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World Wide Web
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What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the leading information retrieval service of the Internet. Using a browser, it provides access to a vast array of mass media and content connected by hyperlinks, which are electronic connections that link related pieces of information, granting users easy access.
Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN developed the World Wide Web beginning in 1989. In 1994, Berners-Lee established the World Wide Web Consortium (W3) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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How does the World Wide Web work?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the leading information service within the Internet, providing access to mass media and content through hyperlinks. Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues at CERN developed it in 1989, including the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which standardized server-client communication.
Web servers use HTTP to send Web pages to a client's computer upon request. A Web page, a retrieval unit, contains links that allow related pages to be retrieved. This is written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and has a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Web browsers allow users to view documents.
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What is a website, and how is it accessed on the World Wide Web?
A website is a collection of files and related resources, like HTML documents, graphic image files, and scripted programs, accessible through the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Internet via a domain name. Websites are hosted on Web servers, which use the HTTP protocol to transfer files to client computers or other servers that request them.
To access a website, you can type its URL into a browser or select a hyperlink. The URL, also known as a Web address, directs your computer to the website's location on the network.
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What is a web browser and how is it used to view information on the World Wide Web?
A web browser is a software program that allows users to view and interact with information on the Internet. It interprets the HTML code of web pages and displays the content according to standard style rules.
To view information, the browser requests documents from servers, which are computers that store and transmit data. The browser then presents this data to the user, allowing them to navigate the World Wide Web through hyperlinks that connect related pieces of information.
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What is a hyperlink and how does it connect different parts of the World Wide Web?
A hyperlink is an electronic connection in a hypertext or hypermedia document that allows direct access from one distinctively marked place to another location on the World Wide Web, whether in the same or a different document.
Hyperlinks create a branching network structure, contrasting with the linear structure of printed material. They act as cross-references, providing quick access to related information. They are most effective when used on a large array of information that is organized into many smaller, related pieces. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the markup language used for encoding web pages.
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How has the World Wide Web changed the way people share and find information around the world?
The World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized information sharing and retrieval, acting as a modern equivalent to the printing press. Starting in the 1990s, the Internet provided people with the near-instant ability to access information globally.
The Web gives users access to mass media and content via hyperlinks that connect related pieces of information. This allows users to easily navigate and access additional information. The Internet has boosted literacy and provided access to music, books, films, and other resources.
However, the Internet is not perfect, as untruths can appear alongside verifiable facts, making it difficult to discern the difference.
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World Wide Web (WWW), the leading information retrieval service of the Internet (the worldwide computer network). The Web gives users access to a vast array of mass media and contentāvia the deep web, the dark web, and the commonly accessible surface webāthat is connected by means of hypertext or hypermedia linksāi.e., hyperlinks, electronic connections that link related pieces of information in order to allow a user easy access to them. Hypertext allows the user to select a word or phrase from text and thereby access other documents that contain additional information pertaining to that word or phrase. Hypermedia documents feature links to images, sounds, animations, and movies. The Web operates within the Internetās basic client-server format; servers are computer programs that store and transmit documents to other computers on the network when asked to, while clients are programs that request documents from a server as the user asks for them. Browser software allows users to view the retrieved documents. Special browsers and platforms such as Tor allow users to do so anonymously.
A hypertext document with its corresponding text and hyperlinks is written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and is assigned an online address called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which standardized communication between servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was made available for general release in January 1992.
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The World Wide Web gained rapid acceptance with the creation of a Web browser called Mosaic, which was developed in the United States by Marc Andreessen and others at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and was released in September 1993. Mosaic allowed people using the Web to use the same sort of āpoint-and-clickā graphical manipulations that had been available in personal computers for some years. In April 1994 Andreessen cofounded Netscape Communications Corporation, whose Netscape Navigator became the dominant Web browser soon after its release in December 1994. BookLink Technologiesā InternetWorks, the first browser with tabs, in which a user could visit another Web site without opening an entirely new window, debuted that same year. By the mid-1990s the World Wide Web had millions of active users.
The software giant Microsoft Corporation became interested in supporting Internet applications on personal computers and developed its own Web browser (based initially on Mosaic), Internet Explorer (IE), in 1995 as an add-on to the Windows 95 operating system. IE was integrated into the Windows operating system in 1996 (that is, it came ābundledā ready-to-use within the operating system of personal computers), which had the effect of reducing competition from other Internet browser manufacturers, such as Netscape. IE soon became the most popular Web browser.
Appleās Safari was released in 2003 as the default browser on Macintosh personal computers and later on iPhones (2007) and iPads (2010). Safari 2.0 (2005) was the first browser with a privacy mode, Private Browsing, in which the application would not save websites in its history, downloaded files in its cache, or personal information entered on Web pages.
The first serious challenger to IEās dominance was Mozillaās Firefox, released in 2004 and designed to address issues with speed and security that had plagued IE. In 2008 Google launched Chrome, the first browser with isolated tabs, which meant that when one tab crashed, other tabs and the whole browser would still function. By 2013 Chrome had become the dominant browser, surpassing IE and Firefox in popularity. Microsoft discontinued IE and replaced it with Edge in 2015.
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In the early 21st century, smartphones became more computer-like, and more-advanced services, such as Internet access, became possible. Web usage on smartphones steadily increased, and in 2016 it accounted for more than half of Web browsing.