World-Wide Web, networking, hypertext (WWW, W3, The Web) An
retrieval system which originated from the
CERN High-Energy
Physics laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.
An extensive user community has developed on the Web since its
public introduction in 1991. In the early 1990s, the
developers at CERN spread word of the Web's capabilities to
scientific audiences worldwide. By September 1993, the share
reached 75
gigabytes per month or one percent. By July 1994
On the WWW everything (documents, menus, indices) is
URLs. These can refer to local or remote resources
those available via the
http protocol used to transfer
and provides two basic navigation operations: to follow a
link or to send a query to a server. A variety of client
and server software is freely available.
Most clients and servers also support "forms" which allow the
user to enter arbitrary text as well as selecting options from
customisable menus and on/off switches.
Following the widespread availability of web browsers and
servers, many companies from about 1995 realised they could
use the same software and protocols on their own private
internal
TCP/IP networks giving rise to the term
If you don't have a WWW
browser, but you are on the
Internet, you can access the Web using the command:
telnet www.w3.org
(Internet address 128.141.201.74) but it's much better if you
install a browser on your own computer.
the web.
you will get the latest version and be able to follow
cross-references easily. If you are reading a plain text
version of this dictionary then you will see lots of curly
brackets and strings like
These are transformed into hypertext links when you access it
via the Web.
(1996-10-28)