World Wide Web

:For the world's first web browser, see WorldWideWeb.

Beyond text

The initial WorldWideWeb program at CERN displayed styled text and images, and it was a WYSIWYG HTML editor as well as the browser. Tim Berners-Lee originally made no distinction between surfing (reading) and editing web documents.

Related Topics:
WorldWideWeb - WYSIWYG

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As it ran only on NeXT machines, CERN released a simple, text-only version to the world. Some journalists first encountered the Web through the text browser written by Nicola Pellow and this engendered a myth that the Web was text-only until Mosaic came along. The Web had graphics from the start, at least for the minority of NeXT users.

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Meanwhile, browsers such as Tony Johnson's "Midas" and Pei-Yuan Wei's Viola (1991) added the ability to display graphics also on other Unix machines. In 1993, Marc Andreessen of NCSA released their browser, called "Mosaic for X", that sparked a tremendous rise in the popularity of the Web among novice users. Andreessen went on to found Mosaic Communications Corporation (now Netscape Communications Corporation, a unit of Time Warner). Additional features such as dynamic content, music and animation can be found in modern browsers.

Related Topics:
Pei-Yuan Wei - Viola - Unix - Marc Andreessen - NCSA - Netscape Communications Corporation - Time Warner

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Browser makers do not always adhere to the standards set forth by the W3C, so it is not uncommon for these newer features not to work properly on all browsers. The ever-improving technical capability of the WWW has enabled the development of real-time web-based services such as webcasts, Internet radio and live web cams.

Related Topics:
Webcast - Internet radio - Web cam

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