World Wide Web
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World Wide Web, also known as the WWW or simply "the Web" is the large system of interlinked hypertext documents that is accessed using the Internet. It was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, when he created the first web server, first web browser, first hypertext documents written in HTML, and the first URLs.
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[edit] Web browsers
The usage of the Web spread rapidly, as the source code for Berners-Lee's web browser was put into the public domain in 1993. However, the first commercially successful web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was also released that year, and became the basis for two main web browsers: Netscape and Internet Explorer. The two web browsers developed a rivalry known as the browser wars, in which web standards were compromised. Netscape eventually bowed out of the browser wars, releasing the source code of the browser to the open source community under the name Mozilla; eventually, the Netscape Suite was forked into five projects:
- Mozilla Firefox, a web browser
- Mozilla Thunderbird, an email client
- Mozilla Sunbird, a calendar application
- Chatzilla, an IRC client
- Nvu, a web editor
Besides Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, other web browsers have come into being, including Konqueror, Opera, and Safari.
[edit] Web servers
The first major web server was also developed at NCSA by Robert McCool. However, McCool left NCSA in 1994, and his work was taken up by a group of programmers who formed the Apache project. Apache has since become the most well known web server software, followed by Microsoft's IIS and Sun Microsystems' Sun Java System Web Server.
[edit] Web standards
In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee formed the World Wide Web Consortium, which has become the main web standards body. It has produced a number of standards, including XML, XHTML, Cascading Style Sheets, Resource Definition Framework, Common Gateway Interface, Extensible Stylesheet Language, XQuery, and Document Object Model. The W3C's efforts have spilled over into other standards bodies, including OASIS.
