World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as ), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet.

The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.

The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser. With help from his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word) as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.

A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web.

English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English engineer and computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Web resources may be any type of downloaded media, but web pages are hypertext media that have been formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

A web page (also written as webpage) is a document that is suitable to act as a web resource on the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as ), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet.

Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

Websites are stored in computers that are running a program called a web server that responds to requests made over the Internet from web browsers running on a user's computer.

A web server is server software, or hardware dedicated to running such software, that can satisfy World Wide Web client requests.

Multiple web resources with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website.

All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically part of an intranet.

Such formatting allows for embedded hyperlinks that contain URLs and permit users to navigate to other web resources.

The effect of following a hyperlink may vary with the hypertext system and may sometimes depend on the link itself; for instance, on the World Wide Web most hyperlinks cause the target document to replace the document being displayed, but some are marked to cause the target document to open in a new window.

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.

A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts).

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.

Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows clients to perform remote Web content authoring operations.

On March 12, 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled "Information Management: 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 as 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."

ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web.

With help from his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word) as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.

Robert Cailliau (born 26 January 1947) is a Belgian informatics engineer, computer scientist and author who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name.

With help from his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word) as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture.

Examples of computer applications that use the client–server model are Email, network printing, and the World Wide Web.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the first web browser (WorldWideWeb, which was a web editor as well) and the first web server.

WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) was the first web browser and editor.

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.

Web 1.0 is a retronym referring to the first stage of the World Wide Web's evolution.

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 toward the Web.

The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

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.

It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web.

Historians generally agree that a turning point for the 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.

NCSA Mosaic, or simply Mosaic, is the web browser that popularized the World Wide Web and the Internet.

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.

It provides a multi-dimensional measure of the World Wide Web’s contribution to development and human rights globally.

On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext.

Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web.

An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW for Unix and the X Window System.

ViolaWWW is a discontinued browser, the first to be popular for the World Wide Web (WWW).

Website content can be largely provided by a publisher, or interactively where users contribute content or the content depends upon the users or their actions.

With the growth of the World Wide Web the focus moved to websites, several of which were based on user-generated content, including Wikipedia (2001) and Flickr (2004).

Such formatting allows for embedded hyperlinks that contain URLs and permit users to navigate to other web resources.

Once the world wide web was available, web navigation increasingly became a major aspect and role in jobs and everyday lives.

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".

The concept of the memex influenced the development of early hypertext systems (eventually leading to the creation of the World Wide Web) and personal knowledge base software.