What Is The World Wide Web (WWW)? by Charles Salmon

Today, millions of computers are connected by the World Wide Web. This concept of WWW did not exist before three decades. World Wide Web has now connected every computer scattered across various cities in the globe. Without any effort, a person sitting in one corner of the world can access information present in a server which is physically located in another part of the world. Geographic location is not a consideration if you want to access information. World Wide Web technology has made it possible to gather knowledge about anything and everything. The rules of communication were broken by the advent of World Wide Web where a person can acquire knowledge without conversing with any other human being.

The history

The concept of World Wide Web evolved only in 1990. However, people were interested in connecting different computers right from 1945. A device made of microfilms was used to store and organize huge documents. Anybody who knows the way to access the microfilms can read the information in the documents. This idea was further enhanced in 1968 where the new concept of hypertext was introduced. This is the base of WWW. Hypertext enables linking and organizing documents in an effortless way. Irrespective of the size of the documents, they can be linked and organized within a small amount of time.

The basic step to World Wide Web was put forward by DARPA in 1972 when the agency did a project to connect various research centers. This project was done to centralize document control and facilitate information sharing. The content of the documents is separated from presentation enabling document retrieval in an easier way. This idea was further developed by Tim Berners-Lee from CERN laboratory in 1989. In 1990, he proposed a hypertext system and introduced the term World Wide Web. When the idea was proposed, nobody ever imagined that WWW would become a great success. In 1992, CERN introduced the first portable web browser using which documents were retrieved easily without the use of complex coding techniques.

World Wide Web evolution

The modern World Wide Web has many features including applications, data, API, multimedia, social platform and much more. This technology is improving everyday making more and more additions to the data and services that can be shared. HTML is the hypertext programming language which is used even today to generate web pages. As with any technology, web technology has also seen many changes from the past decade.

Web1.0 was the first web technology which enabled reading of documents. The user was presented with the document he wanted but he cannot make changes or feed any data. The content published on internet is readable only by the humans. Web 2.0 revolutionized internet allowing user interactions. The user can now enter details which the machine can read and manipulate. The need for offline communication reduced with the use of emails. The latest development in the World Wide Web is the Web 3.0 technology which is called the semantic web. This is in the developing phase where there is no centralized data control. It is an open schema using artificial intelligence to mimic human behavior.