Definition of WWW

"WWW" and "The web" redirect here. For other uses of WWW, see WWW (disambiguation). For other uses of web, see Web (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with the Internet.The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,^[3] commonly known as the web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.The web was developed between March 1989 and December 1990.^[4][5] Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems such as ENQUIRE, British engineer Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist and at that time employee of the CERN, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.^[1] 

Function

The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessed by web browsers from web servers. In short, the web can be thought of as an application "running" on the Internet.^[31]

Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing,' or 'navigating the web'. Early studies of this new behavior investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation.^[32]