Meaning:

World Wide Web (WWW), byname the Web, the leading information retrieval service of the Internet (the worldwide computer network). The Web gives users access to a vast array of documents that are connected to each other by means of or hypermedia links— i.e., , electronic connections that link related pieces of information in order to allow a user easy access to them. Hypertext allows the user to select a word or phrase from text and thereby access other documents that contain additional information pertaining to that word or phrase. Hypermedia documents feature links to images, sounds, animations, and movies. The Web operates within the Internet’s basic client-server format; servers are computer programs that store and transmit documents to other computers on the network when asked to, while clients are programs that request documents from a server as the user asks for them. Browser software allows users to view the retrieved documents.

The is a network of online content that is formatted in HTML and accessed via HTTP. The term refers to all the interlinked HTML pages that can be accessed over the internet. It is technically all the web pages, videos, pictures and other online content that can be accessed via a web browser. The world wide web, or WWW, was first created as a method to navigate the now extensive system of connected computers. It was designed by Tim Berners-Lee through a rudimentary hypertext program called Enquire.

The WWW is what most people think of as the internet. But as a matter of fact, the internet is the underlying network connection that allows us to send an email and access the world wide web. Web earlier was a collection of text-based sites hosted by organizations that were technically able enough to set up a web server and learn HTML. Since then, it has only continued to evolve the original design, and now includes many other useful elements like social media and user- generated content that requires minimal technical skills to use. Evolution:

The WWW was introduced and originated by a contractor named Tim Berners-Lee who worked with the European Organization for Nuclear Research developed Enquire-a rudimentary hypertext program. This program was designed in a way in order to make information readily available to users. It also focused on allowing a user to explore relationships between different pages by clicking to get to a different section of a .

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and other scientists at the international organization called CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, developed a computer protocol called the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that became the standard communications language between Internet clients and servers. Exchanges of information on the Internet take place between a server (a computer program that both stores information and transmits it from one computer to another) and a client (also a computer program but one that requests those transmittals of documents from the server). The client is not a person; the person giving instructions to the client is called a user. The first Web server in the United States was the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California. To be able to look at retrieved documents, the user's computer is equipped with browser software. The programmers at CERN also developed a text-based Web browser that was made public in 1992; they also proposed the name World Wide Web for their system.

Documents that comply with the HTTP protocol are called hypertext documents and are written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) which includes both text and links. Links are formally called hypermedia links or hyperlinks that connect related pieces of information through electronic connections. Through links, users can access arrays of documents identified by these shared links. Documents consisting of text are identified through hypertext; and other kinds of information like photos and other images, sounds, and video are identified as hypermedia. Users find and access hypertext or hypermedia through addresses called Uniform Resource Locators or URLs. URLs often contain the letters "http," "www," and "html" showing that, within the HTTP rules, they want to access the World Wide Web by speaking in HTML. Features:

World-Wide Web (WWW) is a hypertext-based information system. Any word in a hypertext document can be specified as a pointer to a different hypertext document where more information pertaining to that word can be found.

The features of www are as follows:

 HyperText Information System.  Cross-Platform.  Distributed. Approximately 70 million active sites as of December 2007.  Open Standards and Open Source. TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.  Web Browser: provides a single interface to many services.  Dynamic, Interactive, Evolving. The amount of information available on the Internet has become so large that it is difficult to search for specific information. The World Wide Web (WWW) makes retrieval easy and quick. The WWW is a search tool that helps you find and retrieve information from a Web site using links to other sites and documents. The WWW was built on the technology called Hypertext. This technology increases accessibility to linked documents on the Internet and helps user to navigate between documents very easily. Hypertext is identified by underlined text and a different color usually. Some places will refer to this types of technique as Jump-Off Points. Hypertext can make links within the same document or to other documents. Each time you access a new document by choosing a link, there is a connection made with the web server that the document is on. Once the appropriate document is retrieved the connection is broken. There is no point in maintaining the link while you are viewing it. This is one reason why the WWW is so efficient. WWW lets you search, traverse, and use many types of information at numerous sites and in multiple forms. This interface is called a browser. Some people refer to a browser as a 'web browser' often these terms are used interchangeably. The WWW is intended to help people share information resources, and services with the widest possible community of users. Thus a user can access the WWW on Apple, UNIX, Macintosh, DOS, Windows, and other operating systems. Just like the Internet, the WWW has a protocol, which is known as HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). HTTP acts as an interface between a Web Client Software, such Netscape Navigator.

A major advantage of the WWW is that it also supports TCP/IP services, such as , FTP, and Archie in addition to HTTP.