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The World Wide Web (or simply the "Web") is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The Web was created around 1990 by the British Tim Berners-Lee and the Belgian Robert Cailliau working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web.

Basic Terms

The World Wide Web is the combination of four basic ideas:

Hypertext: a format of information which allows, in a computer environment, one to move from one part of a document to another or from one document to another through internal connections among these documents (called "hyperlinks");
Resource Identifiers: unique identifiers used to locate a particular resource (computer file, document or other resource) on the network - this is commonly known as a URL or URI, although the two have subtle technical differences;
The Client-server model of computing: a system in which client software or a client computer makes requests of server software or a server computer that provides the client with resources or services, such as data or files; and
Markup language: characters or codes embedded in text which indicate structure, semantic meaning, or advice on presentation.
On the World Wide Web, a client program called a user agent retrieves information resources, such as Web pages and other computer files, from Web servers using their URLs. If the user agent is a kind of Web browser, it displays the resources on a user's computer. The user can then follow hyperlinks in each web page to other World Wide Web resources, whose location is embedded in the hyperlinks. It is also possible, for example by filling in and submitting web forms, to post information back to a Web server for it to save or process in some way. Web pages are often arranged in collections of related material called "Web sites." The act of following hyperlinks from one Web site to another is referred to as "browsing" or sometimes as "surfing" the Web.

The phrase "surfing the Internet" was first made popular in print by Jean Armour Polly, a librarian, in an article called "Surfing the INTERNET", published in the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin in June 1992. Although Polly may have developed the phrase independently, slightly earlier uses of similar terms appeared on Usenet in 1991 and 1992, and some recollections claim it was also used verbally in the hacker community for a couple years before that.[1]

For more information on the distinction between the World Wide Web and the Internet itself—as in everyday use the two are sometimes confused—see Dark internet where this is discussed in more detail.

Although the English word worldwide is normally written as one word (without a space or hyphen), the proper name World Wide Web and abbreviation WWW are now well-established even in formal English. The earliest references to the Web called it the WorldWideWeb (an example of computer programmers' fondness for CamelCase) or the World-Wide Web (with a hyphen, this version of the name is the closest to normal English usage).

Ironically, the abbreviation "WWW" is somewhat impractical in English as it contains two or three times as many syllables (depending on accent) as the full term "World Wide Web", and thus takes longer to say.