World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3, commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks.

Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems like ENQUIRE, British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. At CERN, a European research organization near Geneva situated on Swiss and French soil, 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", and they publicly introduced the project in December of the same year.

There are essentially three components which together form the World Wide Web, the medium which has brought this document to your screen. They are the Internet, the Information Servers which contain and dispense information, and the Web Browser which the individual uses to obtain information and pages from the web. This page briefly describes each of these components.

The quick explanation of the web is this: web browsers use the Internet to access Servers that contain the pages, images, and other files that the web user is interested in receiving. See our page on Client/Server Software Architecture to find out more about the relationship between programs like browsers (referred to as "clients") and servers.