World Wide Web

World Wide Web The collection of WEB SITES which are stored on the WEB SERVERS contained in the Internet. It is known as the Web because each site will usually contains HYPERLINKS to other sites, thus mimicking the structure of a spider's web. The technologies used in the World Wide Web were first developed locally by the English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee at the CONSEIL EUROPÉEN POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLÉAIRE (CERN) for an internal documentation project. Gradually the main ideas of this project percolated outwards to other research organizations and universities, prompted by the success of technologies such as the WIDE AREA INFORMATION SERVERS facility and GOPHER. The main fillip to the growth of the Web took place when the BROWSER known as MOSAIC was developed at the NATIONAL CENTER FOR SUPERCOMPUTING APPLICATIONS. The technology accelerated in the 1990s with more commercial browsers being developed and with the further development of the language used to develop WEB PAGES: the HYPERTEXT MARKUP LANGUAGE, commonly known as HTML. The 1990s saw an explosion in the use of the World Wide Web by commercial companies and a new booming area of the economy known as ECOMMERCE appeared. The 1990s also saw a huge increase in technological developments: more and more powerful WEB SERVERS, the appearance of PLUG-INS which increased the ability of WEB DESIGNERS to present content, the rise of the JAVA programming language which enabled EXECUTABLE CONTENT known as APPLETS to be incorporated into Web pages; the development of technologies such as the SECURE SOCKETS LAYER which provide facilities for the transfer of sensitive data across the World Wide Web; the development and improvement of a wide variety of SEARCH ENGINES; the integration of Web sites with other media including telephony; and the release of HTML AUTHORS which enabled individuals with little knowledge of Web technology to produce sophisticated Web pages.