World Wide Web

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"WWW" and "The Web" redirect here. For other uses of WWW, see WWW (disambiguation). For other uses of web, see Web (disambiguation). For the first web software, see WorldWideWeb. Not to be confused with the Internet.

The World Wide Web, also known as the WWW and the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet.[1] English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.[2][3] The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991.

/wiki/File:Web_Index.svg — A global map of the web index for countries in 2014

History

Main article: History of the World Wide Web

The NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

The corridor where WWW was born. CERN, ground floor of building No.1

Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s.[8] By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe and the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being. In 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.[9] In March 1989 Berners-Lee issued a proposal to the management at CERN for a system called "Mesh" that referenced ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, which used the term "web" and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded in readable text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word hypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners-Lee goes on to use the term hypermedia.[10]

a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, the universal document identifier (UDI), later known as uniform resource locator (URL) and uniform resource identifier (URI);
the publishing language HyperText Markup Language (HTML);
~~the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).~~[24]

        
          GET /home.html HTTP/1.1
          Host: www.example.org

The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfil the request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success:

        
          <html>
            <head>
              <title>www.Example.org – The World Wide Web</title>
            </head>
            <body>
              <p>The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known ...</p>
            </body>
          </html>

References

What is the difference between the Web and the Internet?. World Wide Web Consortium. [2016-04-18].