The Web

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.

Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text, images, embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation, or web surfing, is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application software. The information in the Web is transferred across the Internet using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website. A single web server may provide multiple websites, while some websites, especially the most popular ones, may be provided by multiple servers. Website content is provided by a myriad of companies, organizations, government agencies, and individual users; and comprises an enormous amount of educational, entertainment, commercial, and government information.

The World Wide Web has become the world's dominant software platform. It is the primary tool billions of people worldwide use to interact with the Internet.

The Web was originally conceived as a document management system. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991.

History

The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, and originally conceived as a document management system. The first proposal was written in 1989, and a working system implemented by the end of 1990 including the WorldWideWeb browser and an HTTP server. The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the general public on 23 August 1991. The Web was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created.

CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use. After the NCSA released Mosaic later that year, the Web became very popular with thousands of websites springing up in less than a year. Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit forms, and HTTPd, a server that could process forms (see CGI). Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape the following year and released Navigator, which introduced Java and JavaScript to the Web. It quickly became the dominant browser. Netscape became a public company in 1995 which triggered a frenzy for the Web and started the dot-com bubble. Microsoft responded by developing its own browser, Internet Explorer. By bundling it with Windows, it became the dominant browser for 14 years.

Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which created XML in 1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter XHTML. In the meantime, developers began exploiting an IE feature called XMLHttpRequest to make Ajax applications and launched the Web 2.0 revolution. Mozilla, Opera, and Apple rejected XHTML and created the WHATWG which developed HTML5. In 2009, the W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML and in 2019, ceded control of the HTML specification to the WHATWG.

The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet.

Function

The terms ''Internet'' and ''World Wide Web'' are often used without much distinction. However, the two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of computer networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking. In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URIs. Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS, which are application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet's transport protocols.

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing' (after channel surfing), or 'navigating the Web'. Early studies of this new behavior investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation.

The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL . The browser resolves the server name of the URL () into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as ''203.0.113.4'' or ''2001:db8:2e::7334''. The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well known for the HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing. HTTP normally uses port number 80 and for HTTPS it normally uses port number 443. The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text:

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

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

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

followed by the content of the requested page. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) for a basic web page might look like this:

The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known ...

The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup (