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World Wide Web

The World Wide Web ("WWW", or simply "Web") is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). It is often confused as being analagous to the entire Internet, whereas in fact it is a major subset of it.

Hypertext is viewed using a program called a web browser which retrieves pieces of information, called "documents" or "web pages", from web servers and displays them, typically on a computer monitor. One can then follow hyperlinks on each page to other documents or even send information back to the server to interact with it. The act of following hyperlinks is often called "surfing" or "browsing" the web. Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called "web sites."

Although the English word worldwide is normally written as one word (without a space or hyphen), the proper name World Wide Web and abbreviation WWW are now well-established even in formal English. The earliest references to the Web called it the WorldWideWeb (an example of computer programmers' fondness for intercaps) or the World-Wide Web (with a hyphen, this version of the name is the closest to normal English usage).

The Web can be traced back to a project at CERN in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built ENQUIRE (short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book Berners-Lee recalled from his youth). While it was rather different from the Web we use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee's next project, the Semantic Web). Berners-Lee mentions that much of the motivation behind the project was so that he could access library information that was scattered on several different servers at CERN.

Tim Berners-Lee published a more formal proposal for the actual World Wide Web on November 12, 1990 and wrote the first web page (Extern link: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103- hypertext /hypertext/WWW/Link.html on November 13 on a NeXT workstation. Over Christmas of that year Berners-Lee built all the tools necessary for a working Web, the first actual web browser (which was a web-editor as well), and the first web server. On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the WorldWideWeb project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.

The primary underlying concept of hypertext came from earlier efforts, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex," which was described in the 1945 essay As We May Think.

Berners-Lee's brilliant breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.

The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then in place.

*The WWW required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing Web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of broken links.

*Unlike certain applications such as HyperCard or Gopher, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.

On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.

The Web is made up of three standards: The Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which specifies how each page of information is given a unique "address" at which it can be found; Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which specifies how the browser and server send the information to each other, and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), a method of encoding the information so it can be displayed on a variety of devices. Berners-Lee now heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which develops and maintains these standards and others that enable computers on the Web to effectively store and communicate all kinds of information.

The text above is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
It uses material from the Wikipedia article "World Wide Web".