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.

A good place to start exploring.

WWW servers, clients and tools.

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

.

These are transformed into hypertext links when you access it

via the Web.

See also Java, webhead.

(1996-10-28)