World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system that enables users to access and share digital content over the Internet in a user-friendly manner. It was invented in 1989 by the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and opened to the public in 1993. Conceived as a universal, decentralised information space, the Web allows documents, images, audio, video, and interactive content to be linked through hypertext and delivered globally via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Today, it is the primary platform through which billions of people interact with the Internet.
Web content is hosted on servers, identified through uniform resource locators (URLs), and accessed through applications called web browsers. The fundamental document format of the Web is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which supports text, media, scripting, and hyperlinks that connect one resource to another. Through these links, users navigate, or surf, across websites—collections of related web resources that may be served by one or many servers. The Web’s vast content is produced by organisations, companies, governments, and individuals, making it the world’s dominant platform for education, communication, commerce, entertainment, and information.

Origins and Early Development

Tim Berners-Lee’s invention emerged from his desire to manage and distribute documents at CERN, an institution characterised by rapid staff turnover and extensive external collaboration. Existing computer systems relied on hierarchical file structures or keyword-based indexing, neither of which suited the fluidity of scientific information. Drawing on ideas he developed in his earlier ENQUIRE project and later influenced by Ted Nelson’s hypertext model, Berners-Lee envisioned a system in which documents could be connected through unrestricted links and accessed across independent computers.
Unlike Apple’s HyperCard, which popularised graphical hypertext on individual machines, Berners-Lee’s system was designed from the outset to support multi-user, network-scaled linking, integration with non-text media, gateways to external databases, and decentralised link creation. He implemented the first working version by the end of 1990, including:

• the WorldWideWeb browser/editor,
• the CERN httpd web server,
• the first specification of HTTP,
• the initial syntax for URLs,
• and the adoption of HTML as the standard document format.

Although his 1989 proposal had no formal title, the system soon became known as the World Wide Web.

Expansion and Public Release

The Web was released to external research institutions in January 1991 and made accessible to the general public on 23 August 1991. Its adoption grew rapidly across scientific and academic communities. A major acceleration occurred in 1993, when CERN released its Web technologies royalty-free. This decision allowed universities, developers, and companies worldwide to adopt and extend the platform without legal or financial barriers.
The same year, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications launched Mosaic, the first widely popular graphical browser capable of displaying inline images and processing interactive forms. It significantly improved usability and helped the Web reach mainstream audiences.
Two Mosaic developers, Marc Andreessen and James Clark, founded Netscape, releasing Netscape Navigator in 1994. It introduced Java and JavaScript, quickly became the dominant browser, and played a central role in the mid-1990s Web expansion. Netscape’s celebrated 1995 initial public offering contributed to the growing dot-com boom.

Browser Wars and Standardisation

Microsoft entered the market with Internet Explorer, bundled with Windows, sparking the first major browser war. For over a decade, Internet Explorer remained the dominant browser. As the Web evolved, Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 to develop standards and ensure interoperability.
Key developments included:

• XML (1996), intended to support structured data,
• XHTML, a stricter reformulation of HTML recommended by the W3C,
• and the emergence of Ajax techniques, based on Internet Explorer’s XMLHttpRequest, enabling more interactive web applications and contributing to the Web 2.0 era.

Some developers opposed XHTML’s strictness and founded the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which created HTML5, a more flexible and multimedia-ready standard. By 2009, the W3C ceased further work on XHTML, and in 2019 it ceded ongoing stewardship of HTML to the WHATWG.

Nomenclature and Usage

Berners-Lee maintains that World Wide Web should be written as three separate, capitalised words with no hyphens. In everyday use, however, it is frequently shortened simply to the Web or web. In English, the prefix www is commonly pronounced “double-u double-u double-u”, though some regional variants exist.
In Mandarin Chinese, the Web is often rendered as 万维网 (wàn wéi wǎng), meaning “ten-thousand-dimensional net”, a phonosemantic translation that also reflects the Web’s expansive nature.
As mobile devices and applications grew, many services—including Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter—became widely referred to without the www prefix or even the .com suffix, reflecting shifts in branding and user behaviour.

Function and Operation

The Web operates using HTTP or HTTPS, application-level protocols that run on top of the Internet’s transport and network layers. Accessing a web page typically involves:

1. Entering a URL or selecting a hyperlink.
2. The browser requesting the resource from the web server.
3. The server responding with the requested document or data.
4. The browser rendering the content, including text, images, code, or interactive elements.

Web applications are dynamic web pages that function similarly to traditional software applications. They use server-side and client-side programming to deliver interactive services such as email, retail platforms, search engines, social networks, and online banking.
By the mid-1990s, browsing websites and traversing hyperlinks had become the dominant mode of Internet use, distinguishing the Web from the Internet itself: the Internet provides the underlying network infrastructure, whereas the Web is a service built on top of it.

The Web in the Information Age

The World Wide Web has played a central role in shaping the modern Information Age. It revolutionised communication, commerce, media, scientific collaboration, and knowledge dissemination. Its decentralised design, open standards, and global accessibility enabled unprecedented growth in user participation and content creation.