World-Wide Web
<World-Wide Web, networking, hypertext> (WWW, W3, The Web) An
Internet client-server hypertext distributed information 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 of Web traffic traversing the
NSFNET Internet backbone reached 75 gigabytes per month or one percent.
By July 1994 it was one
terabyte per month.
On the WWW everything (documents, menus, indices) is represented to the user as a
hypertext object in
HTML format.
Hypertext links refer to other documents by their
URLs.
These can refer to local or remote resources accessible via
FTP,
Gopher,
Telnet or
news, as well as those available via the
http protocol used to transfer
hypertext documents.
The client program (known as a
browser), e.g.
NCSA Mosaic,
Netscape Navigator, runs on the user's computer 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 "
intranet".
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
World Wide Web Consortium is the main standards body for the web.
An article by John December (http://sunsite.unc.edu/cmc/mag/1994/oct/webip.html).
A good place to start exploring (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/StartingPoints/NetworkStartingPoints.html).
WWW servers, clients and tools (http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Status.html).
Mailing list: <
[email protected]>.
Usenet newsgroups: news:comp.infosystems.www.misc, news:comp.infosystems.www.providers, news:comp.infosystems.www.users, news:comp.infosystems.announce.
The best way to access
this dictionary is via the Web since 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
(http://hostname/here/there/page.html).
These are transformed into hypertext links when you access it via the Web.
See also
Java,
webhead.
