Global InformationHistory of the World Wide Web information
 The Web's former logo designed by Robert Cailliau | |
| Inventor | Tim Berners-Lee |
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| Inception | 12 March 1989 |
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The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or simply "the Web") is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989. He proposed a "universal linked information system" using several concepts and technologies, the most fundamental of which was the connections that existed between information.[1][2] He developed the first web server, the first web browser, and a document formatting protocol, called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). After publishing the markup language in 1991, and releasing the browser source code for public use in 1993, many other web browsers were soon developed, with Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (later Netscape Navigator), being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the Internet boom of the 1990s. It was a graphical browser which ran on several popular office and home computers, bringing multimedia content to non-technical users by including images and text on the same page.
Websites for use by the general public began to emerge in 1993–94. This spurred competition in server and browser software, highlighted in the Browser wars which was initially dominated by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Following the complete removal of commercial restrictions on Internet use by 1995, commercialization of the Web amidst macroeconomic factors led to the dot-com boom and bust in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The features of HTML evolved over time, leading to HTML version 2 in 1995, HTML3 and HTML4 in 1997, and HTML5 in 2014. The language was extended with advanced formatting in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and with programming capability by JavaScript. AJAX programming delivered dynamic content to users, which sparked a new era in Web design, styled Web 2.0. The use of social media, becoming common-place in the 2010s, allowed users to compose multimedia content without programming skills, making the Web ubiquitous in every-day life.
- ^ Cite error: The named reference
:1was invoked but never defined (see the help page). - ^ Berners-Lee, T.; Cailliau, R.; Groff, J.-F.; Pollermann, B. (1992). "World-Wide Web: The Information Universe". Electron. Netw. Res. Appl. Policy. 2: 52–58. doi:10.1108/eb047254. Archived from the original on 27 December 2022. Retrieved 27 December 2022.