World Wide Web
(1989-present)
thing and computer network
Aged 35
Wikidata WikipediaThe World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text, images, embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation, or web surfing, is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application software. The information in the Web is transferred across the Internet using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website. A single web server may provide multiple websites, while some websites, especially the most popular ones, may be provided by multiple servers. Website content is provided by a myriad of companies, organizations, government agencies, and individual users; and comprises an enormous amount of educational, entertainment, commercial, and government information. The World Wide Web has become the world's dominant software platform. It is the primary tool billions of people worldwide use to interact with the Internet. The Web was originally conceived as a document management system. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991.
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Commemorated on 1 plaque
Where The Web was born. In the offices of this corridor, all the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web were developed. Started in 1990 from a proposal made by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the effort was first divided between an office in building 31 of the Computing and Networking Division (CN) and one in building 2 of the Electronics and Computing for Physics Division (ECP). In 1991 the team came together in these offices, then belonging to ECP. It was composed of two CERN staff members, Tim Berners-Lee (GB) and Robert Cailliau (BE), aided by a number of Fellows, Technical Students, a Coopérant and Summer Students. At the end of 1994 Tim Berners-Lee left CERN to direct the WWW consortium (W3C), a world-wide organization devoted to leading the Web to its full potential. The W3C was founded with the help of CERN, the European Commission, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Institut National pour la Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). In 1995 Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau received the ACM Software System Award for the World Wide Web. In 2004, Tim Berners-Lee was awarded the first Millenium Technology Prize by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. The CERN Library June 2004
European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN CH-1211, Geneva, Switzerland where it was born (1989)