Introduction to the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is indisputably the Internet's most important service. Its success has largely contributed to the explosion in the number of connections and servers on the network of networks, and to the upheaval it has brought about in the economic, social and cultural spheres. In an era characterized by the globalization of trade and the convergence of the IT, telecommunications and audiovisual industries, the World Wide Web is undoubtedly playing a catalytic role in the development of the so-called "information society". For the IT industry, the World Wide Web has enabled a decisive advance in distributed architectures and the standardization of the client workstation.

The World Wide Web was born in 1989 at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva. The W3 project or Web, short for World Wide Web, is presented by its author, Tim Berners-Lee, as a project using a set of network and hypertext techniques to provide user-friendly access to a global information system ("wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents") for teams scattered around the world (the particle physics community) and accessing different types of documents on a large number of heterogeneous, geographically dispersed computers. The project was built on the concept of universal readership, which means that each client can, using software available on a wide range of platforms, consult any information on the Internet, be it text, graphics, video or sound. The World Wide Web thus appears as a set of standard interfaces, rules and protocols for accessing Internet services, and is confused in the minds of many with the Internet itself. The standardization of the various components of the Web is part of the more general context of the work carried out by the Internet Society.