Subject areaChannels and tools
Also known asWWW
The World Wide Web (the Web, or WWW for short) is the system of documents linked to one another by clickable links, which you open in a browser. Tim Berners-Lee proposed it at CERN in Geneva in 1989, and the first page ever published, info.cern.ch, is still online.
The Web rests on hypertext: any document can point to another one, wherever it is stored.
The Web and the Internet are two different things. The Internet is the network that connects the world's computers; the Web is one of the services running on that network, like email. This is why the Web changed communication: it made the Internet readable to anyone without technical skills, and forums, blogs and later social networks grew from there. Its later stages have their own names: Web 2.0, built on user content, and the Semantic Web, where pages also tell machines what they contain.
An example
A chemical company that publishes its product data sheets as linked web pages lets a procurement manager move from the solvent sheet to the regulation sheet in one click, without asking anyone for a document.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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