World Wide Web

The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists, Policy, November's W3 news, Frequently Asked Questions.

What's out there?: Pointers to the world's online information, subjects, W3 servers, etc.; The WWW Virtual Library, started at CERN in 1991, was the first catalogue of the web, organised by subject.; Search engines came later. In the early 1990s, people found pages by following links and lists like this one.
Help: on the browser you are using; Every browser is different, but the idea is the same: follow a link, go back, return home. The first browser already had Previous, Back up, Next and Home buttons.; If a link fails, try going back, reloading, or starting again from the home page.
Software Products: A list of W3 project components and their current state. (e.g. Line Mode X11 Viola NeXTStep Servers Tools Mail robot Library); Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser and editor in 1990 on a NeXT computer. The Line Mode browser, a text-only program, let people use the web from almost any terminal.; Other early browsers followed, such as ViolaWWW and Mosaic, which brought images and a graphical interface to many more people.
Technical: Details of protocols, formats, program internals etc; Three ideas hold the web together: URLs name documents, HTTP fetches them and HTML describes them.; HTML pages are plain text with tags, so they can be written in any editor and read on any computer.
Bibliography: Paper documentation on W3 and references.; Before the web was everywhere, papers and manuals were the best way to learn how it worked. It all began with Tim Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal, "Information Management: A Proposal".; Early specifications were published openly as short documents that anyone could read and comment on.
People: A list of some people involved in the project.; Tim Berners-Lee conceived the web at CERN with colleagues such as Robert Cailliau, who championed the project, and Nicola Pellow, who wrote the Line Mode browser.; Within a few years, people from many countries joined in, building browsers, servers and tools.
History: A summary of the history of the project.; 1989 Tim Berners-Lee's proposal at CERN
1990 The first server and browser are working
1991 The web is announced publicly
1993 CERN puts the software in the public domain; The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 to guide the web's standards.
How can I help ?: If you would like to support the web..; Run a server, write a page, link to others, report what breaks. The web grew because ordinary people kept adding documents and links.; You can also help by making pages accessible, so that everyone can use them.
Getting code: Getting the code by anonymous FTP, etc.; In the early days the software was shared as source code over anonymous FTP, so anyone could compile it, study it and improve it.; Today the same spirit lives on in open source projects, where code is shared and improved together.