Overview of WWW

History

Adopted from
The World Wide Web (W3) is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge.

The World-Wide Web is officially described as a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents". What the World-Wide Web (WWW, W3) project has done is provide users on computer networks with a consistent means to access a variety of media in a simplified fashion.


European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland

What it is

The largest service on the Internet

The Internet is like the road system
WWW is like the parcel delivery service

Integration of earlier Internet systems

Gopher, NEWS, Archie, WAIS, ftp, ... are all seamlessly available

Platform independent

It does not matter whether you have a Macintosh, an IBM PC compatible or a Unix workstation
It does not matter whether the documents are on a Macintosh, an IBM PC compatible or a Unix workstation

Format independent

HTML is not a format but a way of structuring documents.
Formatted documents are available through their own players

Multiple Media

Images
Sound
Movies
Launching of sessions (video, telnet, conferencing, ...

A Little History

1989
Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau propose a networked Hypertext project for High-Energy Physics collaborations

1990
The system is available on the NeXTStep operating system
Further proposal for a Hypertext project for CERN
The name World-Wide Web is decided

1991
The universally portable LMB (Line-Mode Browser) is distributed
Work starts on a Macintosh version
We demonstrate at the San Antonio Hypertext Conference
An X-Window browser is urgent.

1992
people at SLAC, FNAL, NIKHEF, DESY join with servers

1993
NCSA releases X-Mosaic, colour images arrive!
Work starts on a PC version
NCSA releases Mac and PC versions of Mosaic
WWW becomes the Internet demo

1994
CommerceNet started
First International Conference
Overtake Gopher traffic
European Commission project
NetScape "buys up" all manpower
Total shock wave
Driving the Internet expansion
Second International Conference
Tim leaves for MIT

1995
European development is transferred from CERN to INRIA
WWW/Internet fuse in the minds of non-specialists
WWW at the basis of the special G7 conference in Brussels
Third International Conference
First regional conference
Fourth International Conference

Hyper-text

Images & Multimedia

HTTP and WWW servers

WWW Browsers (for HTML)

Browsers allow people to trate the data across the internet as a cohesive whole. By integrating functionality of numerous Internet services clients, the WWW browser functions by (1) fetching the data, (2) iguring out what it is, and (3) taking appropriate action such as properly formatting and displaying it, or saving it the the disk, or doing something else.

URL

Universal Resource Locator
http, https, ftp, gopher, wais, maito, news, telnet

HTML

HTML

Advanced Web

Beyond hyper-text

2-way information

Fill-out Forms

Text Field:

Radio Buttons: Yes No

Checkboxes:

Pop-up Menu: List:

Text Area:

Beyond static HTML files

CGI-BIN - Common Gateway Interface

Evolving HTML

Add-ons

Surfing the Web

Our Server

Popular places

Searches

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