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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the global system of pages accessed via HTTP. For the worldwide
computer network, see Internet. For the web browser, see WorldWideWeb.
"WWW" and "The Web" redirect here. For other uses, see WWW
(disambiguation) and The Web (disambiguation).

World Wide Web

 The historic World Wide Web logo, designed by Robert Cailliau.

Currently, there is no widely accepted logo in use for the WWW.

Year started 1989; 35 years ago

by Tim Berners-Lee

Organization CERN

A web page from Wikipedia displayed in Google

Chrome
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that
enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to
users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists.[1] It allows documents and other web
resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP).[2]
The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in
1989 and opened to the public in 1991. It was conceived as a "universal linked
information system".[3][4] Documents and other media content 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 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 Web has become the world's dominant information systems platform.[5][6][7][8] It is the
primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact with the Internet. [2]
History
Main article: History of the World Wide Web

This NeXT Computer was used by Sir Tim Berners-

Lee at CERN and became the world's first Web server.
The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working
at CERN.[9][10][11] He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding
documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as
distributing them to collaborators outside CERN. In his design, Berners-Lee dismissed
the common tree structure approach, used for instance in the
existing CERNDOC documentation system and in the Unix filesystem, as well as
approaches that relied in tagging files with keywords, as in the VAX/NOTES system.
Instead he adopted concepts he had put into practice with his private ENQUIRE system
(1980) built at CERN. When he became aware of Ted Nelson's hypertext model (1965),
in which documents can be linked in unconstrained ways through hyperlinks associated
with "hot spots" embedded in the text, it helped to confirm the validity of his concept. [12][13]
The model was later popularized by Apple's HyperCard system. Unlike Hypercard,
Berners-Lee's new system from the outset was meant to support links between multiple
databases on independent computers, and to allow simultaneous access by many users
from any computer on the Internet. He also specified that the system should eventually
handle other media besides text, such as graphics, speech, and video. Links could refer
to mutable data files, or even fire up programs on their server computer. He also
conceived "gateways" that would allow access through the new system to documents
organized in other ways (such as traditional computer file systems or the Uucp News).
Finally, he insisted that the system should be decentralized, without any central control
or coordination over the creation of links.[3][9][10][11]
Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN in May 1989, without giving the system a
name.[3] He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including a browser
called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network)
and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development he defined the first
version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the
primary document format.[14] The technology was released outside CERN to other
research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet 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.[15]
[16]

CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its
widespread use.[17][18] After the NCSA released the Mosaic web browser later that year,
the Web's popularity grew rapidly as thousands of websites sprang up in less than a
year.[19][20] Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and
submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server.[21][22] Marc Andreessen and Jim
Clark founded Netscape the following year and released the Navigator browser, 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.[23] Microsoft responded by developing its own
browser, Internet Explorer, starting the browser wars. By bundling it with Windows, it
became the dominant browser for 14 years.[24]
Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which created XML in
1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter XHTML.[25] 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.[26] In 2009, the
W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML.[27] In 2019, it ceded control of the HTML
specification to the WHATWG.[28]
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.[29][30][31][8]
Nomenclature
This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve
this article by adding citations to reliable sources in this section. Unsourced
material may be challenged and removed. (August 2023) (Learn how and when to
remove this template message)

Tim Berners-Lee states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate
words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens.[32] Nonetheless, it is often called
simply the Web, and also often the web; see Capitalization of Internet for details. In
Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic
matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-
dimensional net", a translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the
World Wide Web.
Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when web applications sought to
brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable. As the mobile
Web grew in popularity,[citation needed] services
like Gmail.com, Outlook.com, Myspace.com, Facebook.com and Twitter.com are most
often mentioned without adding "www." (or, indeed, ".com") to the domain. [33]
In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u.[34] Some users
pronounce it dub-dub-dub, particularly in New Zealand.[35] Stephen Fry, in his
"Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh.[36] The English
writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World
Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to
say than what it's short for".[37]
Function
Main articles: HTTP and HTML

The World Wide Web functions as an application

layer protocol that is run "on top of" (figuratively) the Internet, helping to make it more
functional. The advent of the Mosaic web browser helped to make the web much more
usable, to include the display of images and moving images (GIFs).
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.[2]
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.[38]
The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing
a page at the URL http://example.org/home.html. The browser resolves the
server name of the URL (example.org) 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 fulfil 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:
<html>
<head>
<title>Example.org – The World Wide Web</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known ...</p>
</body>
</html>

The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup ( <title> , <p> for
paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words to format the text on the screen. Many
web pages use HTML to reference the URLs of other resources such as images, other
embedded media, scripts that affect page behaviour, and Cascading Style Sheets that
affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for
these other Internet media types. As it receives their content from the web server, the
browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and
these additional resources.
HTML
Main article: HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web
pages and web applications. With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, it
forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web.[39]
Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage
and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of
a web page semantically and originally included cues for the appearance of the
document.
HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML
constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into
the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by
denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes
and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets.
Tags such as <img /> and <input /> directly introduce content into the page. Other
tags such as <p> surround and provide information about document text and may
include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use
them to interpret the content of the page.
HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which
affects the behavior and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and
layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both the
HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit
presentational HTML since 1997.[40]
Linking
Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable
files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a
hyperlink looks like this: <a href="http://example.org/home.html">Example.org
Homepage</a>.

Graphic representation of a minute fraction of the WWW,

demonstrating hyperlinks
Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is
dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee
first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase, which was subsequently
discarded) in November 1990.[41]
The hyperlink structure of the web is described by the webgraph: the nodes of the web
graph correspond to the web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the
hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear,
relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a
phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are
often called "dead" links. The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts
to archive websites. The Internet Archive, active since 1996, is the best known of such
efforts.
WWW prefix
Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-
standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide.
The hostname of a web server is often www, in the same way that it may be ftp for
an FTP server, and news or nntp for a Usenet news server. These hostnames appear
as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The
use of www is not required by any technical or policy standard and many web sites do
not use it; the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch.[42] According to Paolo Palazzi, who
worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of www as subdomain
was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at
www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page; however the
DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending www to an
institution's website domain name was subsequently copied.[43][better source needed] Many
established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such
as www2, secure or en for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that
both the main domain name (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g.,
www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they
may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load
balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of
web servers. Since, currently[as of?], only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same
result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root.[44][dubious – discuss]
When a user submits an incomplete domain name to a web browser in its address bar
input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the
beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what
might be missing. For example, entering "microsoft" may be transformed
to http://www.microsoft.com/ and "openoffice" to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature
started appearing in early versions of Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird'
in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx.[45] [unreliable source?] It is reported
that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile
devices.[46]
Scheme specifiers
The scheme specifiers http:// and https:// at the start of a web URI refer
to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure, respectively. They specify the
communication protocol to use for the request and response. The HTTP protocol is
fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in
HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as
passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically prepend http://
to user-entered URIs, if omitted.
Pages
Main article: Web page
 A screenshot of the home page of Wikimedia Commons
A web page (also written as webpage) is a document that is suitable for the World Wide
Web and web browsers. A web browser displays a web page on a monitor or mobile
device.
The term web page usually refers to what is visible, but may also refer to the contents of
the computer file itself, which is usually a text file containing hypertext written
in HTML or a comparable markup language. Typical web pages provide hypertext for
browsing to other web pages via hyperlinks, often referred to as links. Web browsers
will frequently have to access multiple web resource elements, such as reading style
sheets, scripts, and images, while presenting each web page.
On a network, a web browser can retrieve a web page from a remote web server. The
web server may restrict access to a private network such as a corporate intranet. The
web browser uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make such requests to
the web server.
A static web page is delivered exactly as stored, as web content in the web server's file
system. In contrast, a dynamic web page is generated by a web application, usually
driven by server-side software. Dynamic web pages are used when each user may
require completely different information, for example, bank websites, web email etc.
Static page
Main article: Static web page
A static web page (sometimes called a flat page/stationary page) is a web page that is
delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are
generated by a web application.
Consequently, a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all
contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or
language of the document where such versions are available and the server is
configured to do so.
Dynamic pages
Main articles: Dynamic web page and Ajax (programming)

Dynamic web
page: example of server-side scripting (PHP and MySQL)
A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by
an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side
scripting, parameters determine how the assembly of every new web page proceeds,
including the setting up of more client-side processing.
A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in
the browser. JavaScript programs can interact with the document via Document Object
Model, or DOM, to query page state and alter it. The same client-side techniques can
then dynamically update or change the DOM in the same way.
A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change
some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from
changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history
or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page
update using Ajax technologies will neither create a page to go back to nor truncate
the web browsing history forward of the displayed page. Using Ajax technologies the
end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while
the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The Ajax engine sits only on the
browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server.
Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to
create web pages that are not static web pages, though it has fallen out of common use
since the popularization of AJAX, a term which is now itself rarely used.[citation needed] Client-
side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic
web experience in a browser.
JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich,
then of Netscape, for use within web pages.[47] The standardised version is ECMAScript.
 To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript
[47]

techniques such as Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Client-side script is

delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in
response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed
time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a
new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental
information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can
interact with the page while data is retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the
server to check whether new information is available.[48]
Website

The usap.gov website

Main article: Website
A website[49] is a collection of related web resources including web
pages, multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and
published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com,
and amazon.com.
A website may be accessible via a public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as
the Internet, or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource
locator (URL) that identifies the site.
Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can
be a personal website, a corporate website for a company, a government website, an
organization website, etc. Websites are typically dedicated to a particular topic or
purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and
education. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web,
while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically a
part of an intranet.
Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents, typically
composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup
Language (HTML, XHTML). They may incorporate elements from other websites with
suitable markup anchors. Web pages are accessed and transported with the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption (HTTP Secure,
HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user. The user's application, often a web
browser, renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto
a display terminal.
Hyperlinking between web pages conveys to the reader the site structure and guides
the navigation of the site, which often starts with a home page containing a directory of
the site web content. Some websites require user registration or subscription to access
content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, news
websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message
boards, web-based email, social networking websites, websites providing real-time price
quotations for different types of markets, as well as sites providing various other
services. End users can access websites on a range of devices,
including desktop and laptop computers, tablet computers, smartphones and smart TVs.
Browser
Main article: Web browser
A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software user agent for
accessing information on the World Wide Web. To connect to a website's server and
display its pages, a user needs to have a web browser program. This is the program
that the user runs to download, format, and display a web page on the user's computer.
In addition to allowing users to find, display, and move between web pages, a web
browser will usually have features like keeping bookmarks, recording history, managing
cookies (see below), and home pages and may have facilities for recording passwords
for logging into web sites.
The most popular browsers are Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, and Edge.
Server
Main article: Web server
 The inside and front of a Dell PowerEdge web server, a
computer designed for rack mounting
A Web server is server software, or hardware dedicated to running said software, that
can satisfy World Wide Web client requests. A web server can, in general, contain one
or more websites. A web server processes incoming network requests over HTTP and
several other related protocols.
The primary function of a web server is to store, process and deliver web
pages to clients.[50] The communication between client and server takes place using
the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Pages delivered are most frequently HTML
documents, which may include images, style sheets and scripts in addition to the text
content.

Multiple web servers may be used for a high

traffic website; here, Dell servers are installed together to be used for the Wikimedia
Foundation.
A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates communication by
making a request for a specific resource using HTTP and the server responds with the
content of that resource or an error message if unable to do so. The resource is typically
a real file on the server's secondary storage, but this is not necessarily the case and
depends on how the webserver is implemented.
While the primary function is to serve content, full implementation of HTTP also includes
ways of receiving content from clients. This feature is used for submitting web forms,
including uploading of files.
Many generic web servers also support server-side scripting using Active Server
Pages (ASP), PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), or other scripting languages. This means
that the behavior of the webserver can be scripted in separate files, while the actual
server software remains unchanged. Usually, this function is used to generate HTML
documents dynamically ("on-the-fly") as opposed to returning static documents. The
former is primarily used for retrieving or modifying information from databases. The
latter is typically much faster and more easily cached but cannot deliver dynamic
content.
Web servers can also frequently be found embedded in devices such
as printers, routers, webcams and serving only a local network. The web server may
then be used as a part of a system for monitoring or administering the device in
question. This usually means that no additional software has to be installed on the client
computer since only a web browser is required (which now is included with
most operating systems).
Cookie
Main article: HTTP cookie
An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or
simply cookie) is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's
computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing. Cookies were designed
to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (suc