The
World Wide Web (
www,
W3) is an
information system of interlinked
hypertext documents that are accessed via the
Internet and built on top of the
Domain Name System.
It has also commonly become known simply as
the Web. Individual document pages on the World Wide Web are called
web pages and are accessed with a software application running on the user's computer, commonly called a
web browser. Web pages may contain text,
images, videos, and other
multimedia components, as well as
web navigation features consisting of
hyperlinks.
Tim Berners-Lee, a
British computer scientist and former
CERN employee,
is the inventor of the Web. On 12 March 1989Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web
The 1989 proposal was meant for a more effective CERN communication
system but Berners-Lee also realised the concept could be implemented
throughout the worldBerners-Lee and
Belgian computer scientist
Robert Cailliau
proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of
various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will",and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December of that year.The first test was completed around 20 December 1990 and Berners-Lee reported about the project on the newsgroup
alt.hypertext on 7 August 1991.
On March 12, 1989,
Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to the management at CERN that referenced
ENQUIRE,
a database and software project he had built in 1980, 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 propose the term
hypermedia.
[9]
With help from
Robert Cailliau,
he published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a
"Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a
"web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "
browsers" using a
client–server architecture.
This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within
three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation
of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes
universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new
material of interest to him/her has become available." While the
read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer
to mature, with the
wiki concept,
WebDAV, blogs,
Web 2.0 and
RSS/
Atom.
The proposal was modeled after the
SGML reader
Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the
Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at
Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within
HyTime,
but it was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing
policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a
fee for each document and each document alteration.
A
NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first
web server and also to write the first
web browser,
WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:
[11] the
first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,
which described the project itself.
The first web page may be lost, but
Paul Jones of
UNC-Chapel Hill
in North Carolina announced in May 2013 that Berners-Lee gave him what
he says is the oldest known web page during a 1991 visit to UNC. Jones
stored it on a
magneto-optical drive and on his NeXT computer.
On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the
newsgroup alt.hypertext.
This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available
service on the Internet, although new users only access it after August
23. For this reason this is considered the
internaut's
day. Several newsmedia have reported that the first photo on the Web
was published by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band
Les Horribles Cernettes
taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story, writing
that media were "totally distorting our words for the sake of cheap
sensationalism."
The first server outside Europe was installed at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, to host the
SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992,
whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.
This is supported by a W3C document titled
A Little History of the World Wide Web.
The underlying concept of
hypertext originated in previous projects from the 1960s, such as the
Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University,
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".
[20]
Berners-Lee's 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 assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three
essential technologies:
The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext
systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional
links rather than bidirectional ones, making 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
link rot. Unlike predecessors such as
HyperCard,
the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop
servers and clients independently and to add extensions without
licensing restrictions. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World
Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.
Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the
Gopher
protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away
from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was
ViolaWWW for
Unix and the
X Windowing System.
Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction
of the
Mosaic web browser
in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by
Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the U.S.
High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the
High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, one of
several computing developments initiated by U.S. Senator Al Gore.
Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with
text in web pages and the web's popularity was less than older protocols
in use over the Internet, such as
Gopher and
Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol.
The
World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European
Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994. It was founded
at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet; a year later, a second site was founded at
INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the
European Commission DG InfSo; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at
Keio University. By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still relatively small, but many
notable websites were already active that foreshadowed or inspired today's most popular services.
Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created around the world, adding international standards for
domain names and
HTML. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of web standards (such as the
markup languages to compose web pages in), and has advocated his vision of a
Semantic Web.
The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet
through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important
role in popularizing use of the Internet.
Although the two terms are sometimes
conflated in popular use,
World Wide Web is not
synonymous with
InternetThe Web is an
information space containing hyperlinked documents and other
resources, identified by their URIs.
It is implemented as both client and server software using Internet protocols such as
TCP/IP and
HTTP.
Tim Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 by Queen Elizabeth II for "services to the global development of the Internet".