Introduction to the World Wide Web


The World Wide Web (WWW), also known as the Web, is the most popular way to trawl through the information content of the Internet, the network of networks which has become part of everyday life for millions of people in all sectors of the community.

The concept of the WWW began in March 1989 and was developed by Tim Berners-Lee of the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN). He proposed the project as an effective means of transporting research and ideas throughout the organisation.  The initial project proposal outlined a simple system of using a concept called "networked hypertext" to transmit documents and to communicate among staff in the high-energy physics community.

Hypertext is the organisation of information into connected associations that a user can choose to make. An instance of such an association is called a link or hypertext link. The Web is just a vast amount of information content connected by similar and large number of hypertext links. This allows movement between documents or information on the same Web site or between Web sites, providing a dynamic way of accessing information.

Through the early 1990s the concept was taken on board by computer developers and hundreds of people across the world contributed by writing Web software and documents, or educating others about the Web.

• By 1994 the Web was becoming recognised across the globe and the first International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN;
• Throughout 1994, Web success stories were published by the media;
• By the end of 1994, the Web had 10,000 servers, of which 2,000 were commercial, and 10 million users;
• By February 1997 the number of users had reached 57 million world-wide;
• By November 2000 there was a staggering 407 million users world-wide.

The Web today is a vast resource of information of all types, accessed and used by all sections of society, from research institutions and public and private sector organisations, to all sectors of the business community, as well as private individuals. Very little of today's world is not represented on the World Wide Web.

The use of the Web seems almost limitless. Every day people discover exciting new ways to use the development. Some use it to publish information about their company or hobbies whilst, increasingly, it is used to conduct business.  Companies are being set up which rely totally on the Web as a delivery mechanism and are frequently referred to as dot.coms.

The WWW is the interactive, graphical portion of the Internet, reflecting the fact that the millions of documents or pages of information stored on many computers found throughout the world, may contain text, images, sound and movie clips. The computers that store Web documents are called Web servers.  They run special software that lets you connect to the Web server and view the stored documents.