The Tangled Web

Preface

Just fifteen years ago, the Web was as simple as it was unimportant: a quirky mechanism that allowed a handful of students, plus a bunch of asocial, basement-dwelling geeks, to visit each other’s home pages dedicated to science, pets, or poetry. Today, it is the platform of choice for writing complex, interactive applications (from mail clients to image editors to computer games) and a medium reaching hundreds of millions of casual users around the globe. It is also an essential tool of commerce, important enough to be credited for causing a recession when the 1999 to 2001 dot-com bubble burst.

This progression from obscurity to ubiquity was amazingly fast, even by the standards we are accustomed to in today’s information age—and its speed ...