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History
If you are familiar with hypertext, then you are
familiar with the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW
originated with a organization called CERN (in Switzerland)
in the late 1980's. CERN
was a meeting place for physicists
from all over the world. They performed a lot of collaboration
on complex physics, engineering, and information handling projects.
Due to the geographical dispersion of large collaboration projects
and the rapid growth of fellows, students, and visiting students,
the physicists needed a faster method for world-wide collaboration.
So, Tim Berners-Lee developed a project for solving this problem.
The WWW originated with a
organization called CERN (in Switzerland) in the late 1980's.
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The project involved two phases:
- The first phase, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs,
involved CERN using existing hardware and software in addition to utilizing simple browsers
for the user's workstations
- The second phase involved extending the application area by allowing the users to add
new material
Berners-Lee project involved using hypertext to provide a single-user interface for the vast
amount of stored information (reports, notes, databases, computer documentation, etc) as well
as adopting a standard for Internet communication. This involved developing HTML (Hypertext
Mark-up Language) for formatting the on-line documentation.
The WWW project was launched in March 1989 and quickly gain popularity among Internet users. CERN
help with its popularity by making the code publicly available and encouraging on-line collaboration
among academic and commercial parties.
The WWW project was launched in March 1989 and quickly gain
popularity among Internet users.
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Soon many organization began adopting the standard Internet protocols developed by Berners-Lee.
Many WWW servers were created by these organizations and the organizations encoded their information in HTML.
This lead to the formation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3 Consortium).
In the early 1990's, the web reached its critical mass. There were so
many servers but no easy way to access them. An organization at the University of Illinois, the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) began writing a graphical user-interface
which can be accessed through the web: Mosiac. Mosiac was written for three different computers
and was released for free for educational purposes. This continued the growth popularity of the web.
Later the Netscape browser (developed by the same programmers who developed
Mosiac) added to the growth of the web. The web continues to
grow today.
What is WWW?
Now that you know the history of the WWW, you may wonder what is it?
The World Wide Web is a global, seamless environment (you can
think of it as a network of computers) in which all
information (text, images, audio, video, etc.) that is accessible
from the Internet can be accessed in a consistent and simple way by
using a standard set of naming and access conventions.
You see the WWW in effect by viewing this webpage or through accessing
other web sites around the world through clicking on a hyperlink. There
is no extra work on your part. Tim Berners-Lee model permits you to this
because it is the adopted standard for all computer servers around the world.
That is why the Web (WWW) is so popular: the ease of use, the ease of
moving from one place to the other, it combines text, graphics, audio, etc.,
and it is easy to publish information. There are millions of people using it
now and everyday.
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