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Word Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, proposing a system of hyperlinked documents accessed via the Internet. He built the first website by December 1990, which described the project. The World Wide Web was first opened to the public in August 1991. It has since grown to encompass billions of interlinked web pages and become a global information system.

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61 views

Word Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, proposing a system of hyperlinked documents accessed via the Internet. He built the first website by December 1990, which described the project. The World Wide Web was first opened to the public in August 1991. It has since grown to encompass billions of interlinked web pages and become a global information system.

Uploaded by

Richard Edward
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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World Wide Web

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


"WWW" and "The web" redirect here. For other uses of WWW, see WWW
(disambiguation). For other uses of web, see Web (disambiguation).
The World Wide Web (WWW, W3) is an information system of interlinked hypertext
documents that are accessed via the Internet.[1] 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,[2] is considered
the inventor of the Web. On 12 March 1989,[3] Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what
would eventually become the World Wide Web.[4] The 1989 proposal was meant for a more
effective CERN communication system but Berners-Lee eventually realised the concept
could be implemented throughout the world.[5] Berners-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",[6] and Berners-Lee
finished the first website in December of that year.[7] 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.[8]

Contents

1 History

2 Function
o 2.1 Linking
o 2.2 Dynamic updates of web pages
o 2.3 WWW prefix
o 2.4 Scheme specifiers

3 Web servers

4 Web security

5 Privacy

6 Intellectual property

7 Standards

8 Accessibility

9 Internationalization

10 Statistics

11 Speed issues

12 Caching

13 See also

14 Further reading

15 External links

16 References

History
Main article: History of the World Wide Web

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


In the May 1970 issue of Popular Science magazine, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that
satellites would someday "bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your
fingertips" using a console that would combine the functionality of the photocopier,
telephone, television and a small computer, allowing data transfer and video conferencing
around the globe.[9]
On March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that referenced ENQUIRE, a
database and software project he had built in 1980, and described a more elaborate
information management system.[10]

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 clientserver
architecture.[6] 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.[11]
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.

The CERN data center in 2010 housing some WWW servers


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:[12] the first web browser (which was a web
editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,[13] 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.[14]
On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project
on the newsgroup alt.hypertext.[15] 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."[16]

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,[17] whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.[18][19] This is supported by a W3C document
titled A Little History of the World Wide Web.[20]

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