World Wide Web

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

Origins

See also: History of the Internet

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The Web can be traced back to a project at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau built ENQUIRE (short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book Berners-Lee recalled from his youth).

Related Topics:
CERN - 1989 - Tim Berners-Lee - Robert Cailliau - ENQUIRE - Enquire Within Upon Everything

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While it was rather different from the Web we use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee's next project, the Semantic Web). Berners-Lee mentions that much of the motivation behind the project was so that he could access library information that was scattered on several different servers at CERN.

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Tim Berners-Lee published a more formal proposal for the actual World Wide Web on November 12, 1990 http://www.w3.org/Proposal. Implementation began on November 13, 1990 when Berners-Lee wrote the first Web page http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html on a NeXT workstation.

Related Topics:
Tim Berners-Lee - November 12 - 1990 - November 13 - NeXT

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During the Christmas holiday of that year, Berners-Lee built all the tools necessary for a working Web http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb: the first Web browser (which was a Web editor as well) and the first Web server.

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On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

Related Topics:
August 6 - 1991 - Newsgroup

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The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex," which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".

Related Topics:
Hypertext - Ted Nelson - Project Xanadu - Douglas Engelbart - ON-Line System - Vannevar Bush - Microfilm - Memex - As We May Think

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Berners-Lee's brilliant breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.

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The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then available.

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• The WWW required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing Web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of broken links.
• Unlike certain applications such as HyperCard or Gopher, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.

On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.

Related Topics:
April 30 - 1993

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