A Very Brief Overview

Summary This document provides a very brief explanation of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW, and often referred to as "the Web") is the sum of millions of documents that are publicly accessible on computers around the world, computers which are connected to each other by the Internet.

Documents on the World Wide Web are often referred to as Web pages. A group of pages comprises a Web site. The main page of a Web site is known as the home page of the site.

World Wide Web documents are written in simple formatting language known as HTML, which stands for "hypertext markup language". HTML is a rapidly-evolving language; web authors are able to implement increasingly sophisticated techniques for graphic design, database searching, etc. The Web also allows for the transmission of a variety of media types, including video, animation, live audio, and even 3-D "virtual worlds."

Users of the World Wide Web run a program called a browser on their computer to retrieve documents from the computers on the Internet which store them. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. A computer that stores Web documents is called a Web server, because that computer "serves" documents to any browser that requests them.

The beauty of the World Wide Web is that Web pages and sites are connected to each other via hyperlinks. Hyperlinks typically appear as highlighted and underlined text or framed images that, when clicked, take the user to another site on the web or another place in the text. The author of a so-called hypertext document can create hyperlinks between words, phrases and images in their Web site and any other Web site in the world. Hypertext allows for great flexibility in the way online information is organized and accessed, making it possible for users of the Web to efficiently locate and view related information gathered from a multitude of sources around the globe.

The World Wide Web was created by researchers at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. It has since expanded far beyond the high energy physics community to serve as the platform for a global, online store of knowledge, containing information from a great diversity of sources and accessible to Internet users around the world. Though information on the Web is contained in individual computers scattered across the globe, the fact that each of these computers is connected to the Internet and can communicate via common standards allows all of the information to become part of a single body of knowledge. The World Wide Web is currently the most advanced information system on the Internet, and most web browsers can access information in older Internet information systems such as ftp, gopher, WAIS, and Usenet.

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