World Wide Web

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Web's historic logo designed by Robert Cailliau

The World Wide Web (W3), abbreviated as WWW and 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 earlier hypertext systems, English engineer
and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web
Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide
Web.[1] At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, 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",[2] and publicly introduced the project in
December.[3]

"The World-Wide Web was developed to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture,
which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common
project."[4]

Contents
[hide]

 1 History
 2 Function
o 2.1 Linking
o 2.2 Dynamic updates of web pages
o 2.3 WWW prefix
 3 Privacy
 4 Security
 5 Standards
 6 Accessibility
 7 Internationalization
 8 Statistics
 9 Speed issues
 10 Caching
 11 See also
 12 Notes
 13 References
 14 External links

[edit] History
Main article: History of the World Wide Web
In the May 1970 issue of Popular Science magazine Arthur C. Clarke was reported to have
predicted that satellites would one day "bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your
fingertips" using a console that would combine the functionality of the Xerox, telephone,
television and a small computer, allowing data transfer and video conferencing around the globe.
[5]

In March 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.[6]

With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal (on November 12, 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 client–server architecture.[2] 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." See Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom, which have
taken a little longer to mature.

The proposal was modeled after the Dynatext SGML reader 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 technically advanced and 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.

This NeXT Computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first web server
The CERN datacenter 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:[7] the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the
first web server; and the first web pages,[8] which described the project itself. On August 6, 1991,
he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.[9]
This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. The
first photo on the web was uploaded by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band
Les Horribles Cernettes.

Web as a "Side Effect" of the 40 years of Particle Physics Experiments. It happened many times
during history of science that the most impressive results of large scale scientific efforts appeared
far away from the main directions of those efforts... After the World War 2 the nuclear centers of
almost all developed countries became the places with the highest concentration of talented
scientists. For about four decades many of them were invited to the international CERN's
Laboratories. So specific kind of the CERN's intellectual "entire culture" (as you called it) was
constantly growing from one generation of the scientists and engineers to another. When the
concentration of the human talents per square foot of the CERN's Labs reached the critical mass,
it caused an inte

Features

Many of WorldWideWeb's features.

WorldWideWeb was capable of displaying basic style sheets,[4] downloading and opening any
file type supported by the NeXT system (PostScript,[2][4] movies [4] and sounds[4]), browsing
newsgroups, and spellchecking. At first, images were displayed in separate windows, until
NeXTSTEP's Text class supported Image objects.[4]

The browser was also an WYSIWYG editor.[1][2] It allowed the simultaneous editing and linking
of many pages in different windows. The functions "Mark Selection", which created an anchor,
and "Link to Marked", which made the selected text an anchor linking to the last marked anchor,
allowed the creation of links. Editing pages remotely was not yet possible, as the HTTP PUT
method had not yet been implemented.[1] Files would be edited in a local file system which was
in turn served onto the Web by an HTTP server.

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contained Next and Previous buttons that would
automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, similar to Opera's
Rewind and Fast Forward buttons; i.e., if one navigated to a page from a table of links, the
Previous button would cause the browser to load the previous page linked in the table.[1] This was
useful for web pages which contained lists of links. Many still do, but the user interface link-
chaining was not adopted by other browser writers, and it disappeared until it was later picked up
by later web browsers. An equivalent functionality is nowadays provided by connecting web
pages with explicit navigation buttons repeated on each webpage among those links, or with
typed links in the headers of the page. This places more of a burden on web site designers and
developers, but allows them to control the presentation of the navigation links.

WorldWideWeb didn't have features like bookmarks, but a similar feature was presented in the
browser: if a link should be saved for later use linking it to the user's own home page (start
page), the link would be remembered in the same fashion as a bookmark. The ability to create
more home pages were implemented, similar to folders in the actual web browsers bookmarks.[2]

Later versions were also able to display inline images.[1]

WorldWideWeb was able to use different protocols: FTP,[1] HTTP,[1] NNTP,[1] and local files[1]