World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is the Internet application that most people turn to when they want to access or publish information online. Developed beginning in 1989 and released publicly in 1991, the Web allows people to retrieve and publish information through use of a single user interface (the Web browser), a simple word-processing-style publishing language (hypertext markup language, or HTML), and a less simple communication standard (hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP) that specifies how information on the Internet is transmitted and retrieved by controlling how computers issue and respond to requests for information. Reduced to its simplest definition, the Web consists of documents and links to and from documents transmitted over the Internet.

The Web is one of the most revolutionary inventions in history, combining the word-processing abilities, data retrieval-and-storage power, and graphical-display capabilities of the personal computer with the publishing capacity of Gutenberg's printing press. Then it throws in all the possibilities of TV, radio, photography, and animation. In addition, due to the immense growth in its popularity over the course of a decade, the Web has become one of the world's foremost “places” of business, through e-commerce. While a number of researchers and even a few politicians knew such things were possible before it was created, the advent of the World Wide Web suddenly made it clear to the public that the Internet combined the characteristics of all of the media that had come before it, while adding the unique, hypertext-driven power of interactivity to the mix. The Web offered anyone with a computer and the inclination to take advantage of the innovation a chance to become a part of a linked world of information. While the Internet had existed in one form or another since 1969, it was after the introduction of the Web that the Internet became the wildly popular medium that it is today.

Although the two are often confused, the Web is not the Internet, even though the former could not exist without the latter. The Internet is much larger than the Web, and contains many other information exchange applications, including email, file transfer protocol (FTP), Gopher, chat, Telnet, and USENET, among others. None of these are the Web either, although the Web can be and often is used to display them all.

That is the key to the Web: It is a system of organizing, linking, and displaying information in a way that computers all over the world can access, regardless of the operating system they employ, the kind of software they use to render information, the kind of server the information is stored on, or the online network that information is passing through. Today, the Web can even be accessed on personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones as well as computers. Its lack of limitation is by design; the Web was created specifically to foster universal access. The Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, wrote in his book Weaving the Web that he had believed since high school that computers could be much more powerful if they could be programmed to link otherwise unconnected information. “Inventing the World Wide Web,” he wrote, “involved my growing realization that there was a power in arranging ideas in an unconstrained, web-like way.”

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