The World Wide Web (WWW) is more generally referred to as the Web. It is an information space in which Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) such as https://www.example.com/ are used to identify documents and other online resources. They may be linked together using hypertext and are available over the Internet.¹⁾

Users can access the WWW's resources by using a software tool known as a web browser.²⁾

Tim Berners-Lee, an English physicist, established the World Wide Web in 1989.³⁾

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser. This occurred while he was working at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was made available outside of CERN in 1991, first to other research institutes in January 1991. ⁴⁾

In August 1991, the browser was made available to the broader public over the Internet.⁵⁾

The World Wide Web has played a critical role in the evolution of the Information Age. It is the principal means through which billions of people communicate on the Internet.⁶⁾

Any sort of downloaded media can be used as a web resource. Web pages are Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)-formatted hypertext media (HTML). This type of style enables for embedded hyperlinks with URLs, allowing visitors to easily browse to other web sites. Web pages may include images, video, audio, and software components in addition to text. They are displayed as coherent pages of multimedia content in the user's web browser. A website is made up of several web resources that have a common subject, a common domain name, or both.⁷⁾

Websites are kept on computers that run a program known as a web server, which answers to Internet requests made by web browsers running on users' PCs.⁸⁾

Website content can be produced primarily by a publisher or interactively, in which users contribute material or the content is determined by the users or their behaviors.⁹⁾

Websites can be given for a variety of reasons, including information, entertainment, commerce, government, or non-government.¹⁰⁾

By the second part of the 1980s, Tim Berners-vision Lee's of a global hyperlinked information system had become a reality.¹¹⁾

By 1985, the worldwide Internet was taking off in Europe, and the Domain Name System (on which the Uniform Resource Locator is based) was born.¹²⁾

In 1988, the first direct IP link was established between Europe and North America, and Berners-Lee openly discussed the idea of a web-like system at CERN. Berners-Lee published “Information Management: A Proposal” on March 12, 1989. It was sent to CERN management for a system called “Mesh” with the reference ENQUIRE.¹³⁾

In 1980, he created a database and software project that utilized the name “web” and envisioned a more complex information management system based on links contained in readable text. He indicated that such a system may be referred to using one of the current definitions of the term hypertext, which he claims was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason why such hypertext connections could not also include multimedia content like as images, voice, and video, hence Berners-Lee uses the word hypermedia. On November 12, 1990, he made a more official proposal to establish a “Hypertext project” he termed “WorldWideWeb” with the assistance of his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau.¹⁴⁾

The first Web server was roughly a month away from passing its first test. The CERN-licensed Dynatext system was a crucial player in the expansion of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia inside HyTime, but it was deemed too costly and had an unsuitable licensing policy for usage in the wider high energy physics community.¹⁵⁾

Berners-Lee used a NeXT Computer to create the world's first web server and the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990.¹⁶⁾

Berners-Lee had created all of the technologies required for a functioning Web by Christmas 1990, the first web browser (including a web editor) and the first web server.¹⁷⁾

On December 20, 1990, the first web site, which outlined the project, was launched.¹⁸⁾

The initial web page may have been lost, however Paul Jones of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in North Carolina revealed in May 2013 that Berners-Lee handed him what he claims is the earliest known web page during a 1991 visit to UNC. Jones kept it on a magneto-optical disk as well as his NeXT computer.¹⁹⁾

On the newsgroup alt.hypertext on August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee released a brief overview of the World Wide Web project.²⁰⁾

The SPIRES-HEP database was hosted on the first server outside of Europe, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California.²¹⁾

The date of this occurrence varies greatly according to accounts. Berners-breakthrough Lee's was to connect hypertext to the Internet, according to the World Wide Web Consortium's chronology, but SLAC claims December 1991, as does a W3C article titled A Little History of the World Wide Web.²²⁾

The World Wide Web differed significantly from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required just unidirectional connections rather than bidirectional ones, allowing anybody to link to another site without the owner of that resource taking any action. It also made it easier to create web servers and browsers, but it introduced the persistent problem of link rot.²³⁾

Scholars largely believe that the debut of the Mosaic web browser was a watershed moment for the World Wide Web. It was first launched in 1993.²⁴⁾

A graphical browser created by a team led by Marc Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC). Mosaic was funded by the United States High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Senator Al Gore of the United States pioneered major computer advances.²⁵⁾

Other websites were formed all around the world thanks to the Internet. This prompted the establishment of worldwide protocols and formatting standards.²⁶⁾

Berners-Lee remained active in driving the development of online standards, such as markup languages used to create web pages, and he pushed for his vision of a Semantic Web.²⁷⁾

The World Wide Web facilitated the distribution of information via the Internet in an easy-to-use and adaptable manner, and it consequently played a key role in popularizing Internet use. ²⁸⁾

Although the two names are sometimes used interchangeably, the World Wide Web is not identical with the Internet.²⁹⁾

The Web is a data space that contains hyperlinked documents and other resources designated by URIs. It is implemented as client and server software, with Internet protocols like as TCP/IP and HTTP being used.³⁰⁾

Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee in 2004 for “services to the worldwide development of the Internet”.³¹⁾