World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a library of billions of pages of information known as web pages.
The pages are written using hypertext, which links them.
A program called a browser on your computer uses a web address (URL) to request a page.
The request is routed through the Internet to the correct server, and the page is sent back to your computer.

How Does It Work?

The world wide web is like a global filing system that runs on the internet.
Each entry in this filing system is a website, which can consist of many webpages.
Each webpage brings code, text, and multimedia files together.
Hyperlinks are special interconnections between webpages that help users navigate through the world wide web.

As the internet grew it became difficult to find information.
Data was stored in a tree structure, the way files are stored on a personal computer.
In 1989, English engineer Tim Berners-Lee came up with a solution to flatten the tree by making related files link to each other with clickable hyperlinks.
This meant that to find something, users could simply jump from one relevant document to the next, instead of backtracking through a maze of folders.
In 1993, Marc Andreessen developed the first browser program -Mosaic- with text, pictures, and hypertext links

As the name suggests, the world wide web would look like an incredibly complex tangle if visualized.
A webpage would be a dot, and a hyperlink would be a line linking two pages together.
Popular websites would be incredibly knotted as they have many webpages linking to and from them.

Nowadays, there are more than a billion websites on the internet.
To store all this information on CD-ROMs would require a stack of disks reaching up to the moon.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing are invaluable tools to help users find relevant information in a sea of advertisements, social media, and artistic content.

A lot of people think that the world wide web and the internet are the same, but they are not.
By the end of 1993, there were only 623 websites on the World Wide Web.
The first website is still online.
Initially, Tim B Lee wanted to name the WWW as Information Mesh, Mine of Information, or Information Mine.
WWW was made available to everyone for free in 1993.
The first-ever Web page was just about the information on the World Wide Web project.
WWW is the fastest-growing communication medium of all time.
- It took just four years to reach 50 million people.
- Radio took 38 years and TV took 13 years to achieve that mark.
The first photo uploaded on the Web was in 1992.
- The image was of CERN’s in-house band called Les Horribles Cernettes.
Mike Sendall, Tim Berners-Lee’s boss said it is a “Vague, but exciting” on the first proposal document for the worldwide web.