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The World Wide Web as defined by webopedia.com is “a system of Internet servers that support specially formatted documents†“The documents are formatted in a programming language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language)â€
The World Wide Web incorporates all types of services such as retrieving documents, viewing images, listening to sound files, viewing programs, video and animation.
The World Wide Web or WWW was first conceived as an idea in 1980 by Tim Berners – Lee while at CERN in Geneva and later refined by him and Robert Cailliu with the first web browser being written in 1990. “CERN is a meeting place for physicists from all over the world, who collaborate on complex physics, engineering and information handling projectsâ€
A NeXTcube was used by Tim Berners Lee and this became the first web server and was used to write the first web browser as mentioned above. Here is a link to that page, archived through wikipedia.
Tim Berners Lee has been quoted as saying “The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledgeâ€. While the idea was conceived at CERN, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, (NCSA) developed many of the tools that made the Web usable for the everyday civilian.
According to the link below “The basic idea of WWW was to merge the technologies of personal computers, computer networking and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information systemâ€
“The first Web site went on-line in 1991. On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone.â€
This is the authorising language used on the World Wide Web to create documents. It uses a variety of tags and attributes to define the structure of a Web document.
An important part of the World Wide Web is the use of Hyperlinks on websites that you view or visit. A hyperlink is an area in a page where you can click with your mouse to retrieve other documents, for instance pictures or written files. “Hyperlinks are the most essential ingredient of all hypertext systems, including the World Wide Webâ€.
Everything that you view on the Web has it’s own unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator). A URL is basically the address of the website or item that you are currently viewing. “The first part of the address indicates what protocol to use, and the second part specifies the IP address or the domain name where the resource it loacated†Domain names are used in URLs to identify particular Web Pages.
“A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, and other information typically located on a web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network.â€
The most popular web browser would probably be Microsoft Explorer which comes as standard on every bought Microsoft windows computer, yet, more and more people are starting to switch over to Mozilla Firefox due to better security and it being generally more user friendly. The most common web browser in use for Apple computers is Apple Safari. Other web browsers available include Netscape and Opera.