World Wide Web 2023

Happy World Wide Web folks! What we’d have done without this incredible human creation right? So, let’s celebrate this special day!

Now as usual, let’s learn a little about it

World Wide Web (WWW), byname the Web, the leading information retrieval service of the Internet (the worldwide computer network).

The Web gives users access to a vast array of content—via the deep web, the dark web, and the commonly accessible surface web—that is connected by means of hypertext or hypermedia links—i.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 Internet’s 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.

How it was created?

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.

Picture of Tim Berners-Lee(Picture taken by Britannica)

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 “point-and-click” 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 Technologies’ 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.

Read more about it here: Britannica