World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is an information system that makes the Internet easier to use. While the Internet is a physical entity (a vast network of computers), the World Wide Web is more of a concept. It is a special way to encode, retrieve, and navigate many resources that are stored on Internet-linked computers. Such resources include e-mail, file transfer protocol, real-time communications, electronic bulletin boards, newsgroups, and Telnet. Each of these applications has a different set of communication rules that allows it take place. The World Wide Web makes all of these applications accessible through one interface.
The Internet has been evolving since the 1960s. Early users could send text messages to each other and store files so that others could access them, but the process was complicated and required knowledge of computer languages. In order for the Internet to become useful to the average person, an easier search and retrieval system was needed. In 1991 researchers at the University of Minnesota developed an internet navigation system (or browser) called Gopher. Although Gopher was menu-driven and featured point-and-click ease, it was still text based.
Around the same time a young man named Tim Berners-Lee developed a combination editor/browser called World Wide Web that included a graphical user interface (GUI). Berners-Lee worked for CERN, a European organization conducting advanced physics research. CERN had a large internal computer network on which researchers stored data and information in a variety of formats. The World Wide Web browser provided a single interface for downloading and displaying all these different resources. It featured a navigational tool called hypertext that allowed immediate jumping from one resource to another, even if they were stored on different computers.
Berners-Lee openly shared his computer code with others on the Internet, and its usefulness was immediately recognized. He developed a new communications protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) for traversing hypertext links. He used elements of a markup language called SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) to format information and include hypertext links in documents. This eventually evolved into the more user-friendly HyperText Markup Language (HTML) widely used today to write and encode Web documents.
Throughout the 1990s, other browsers were released, including ViolaWWW, Erwise, Midas, and Mosaic. Mosaic was a graphical browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Released in 1993, it became very popular and was the precursor for the NetScape Navigator browser. By this time, the ideas behind the World Wide Web code had become more preeminent than the program itself. Berners-Lee changed the program's name to Nexus to distinguish it from what he called the "abstract space" on the Internet now known as the World Wide Web.
Today's World Wide Web is based on client-server interaction. A Web server is a computer that knows where to find resources (given their address) and how to extract them when someone asks. The asking is done through a client, which is a computer program such as Netscape, Internet Explorer, or Lynx, that presents the resources retrieved from the server. Berners-Lee developed an addressing syntax now called Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to specify the location and name of each resource. Every Web address has a form similar to "http://www.webpage.com," where http identifies the protocol of the resource and the remaining portion tells the client which server to contact for its retrieval.
The World Wide Web is possible because of common use of the HTTP, URL, and HTML standards. In 1994 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was formed to ensure that compatible specifications are used by the various parties involved in web technology. Developers, vendors, and web-based business leaders from around the world obtain a consensus on which specifications, protocols, and data formats should be used for the common good. However, there is no central authority that controls who can start a server or what type of resources are available on the World Wide Web.
Although it is not the only Internet resource tool, the World Wide Web is the most popular. In 1994 there were approximately 3,000 Web sites. By the end of 2000 there were more than 10 million web sites, representing a cross-section of global society. The Web made the internet accessible to average people who didn't know computer programming. It is used not only by businesses, educational institutions, and organizations, but by individuals. Many people have their own personal web pages on which they post information and photos.
The World Wide Web provides a single easy-to-use interface for accessing Internet resources in a variety of media, including programs, data, pictures, sound and video. Future trends for the World Wide Web include improved markup languages, such as XML, voice recognition, scalable vector graphics, and Web pages designed to be read by computer programs (rather than humans) using a technology called Resource Description Framework. All of these technologies are designed to improve resource sharing over the Internet and enhance the interactivity of the World Wide Web.
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