World Wide Web

What is the World Wide Web?

WWW(World Wide Web) is a branch of the Internet. Due to the paramount importance of the World Wide Web, the term is often equated with the Internet. With the introduction of the World Wide Web, it was possible for the first time to provide and exchange multimedia content interactively and internationally in a flexible manner. And so, with the help of the World Wide Web service, the Internet was able to celebrate its global triumph.

Of course, it wasn’t always obvious that the internet would become as huge as it has. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and Windows said in 1993 “The Internet? We are not interested in it.”. Then doubled down in ’94 with “I see little commercial potential for the Internet for the next 10 years.”. Easy mistake to make.

The aim of the World Wide Web in its development was to make information accessible worldwide and to link its content with one another. A web browser is required as software to display the WWW. Other well-known Internet services such as e-mails or the nowadays little used Telnet do not belong to the World Wide Web.

The WWW is based on the HTTP (/ HTTPS) transmission protocol, which is responsible for establishing a connection between the browser and a server. The content is displayed in the browser using the description language HTML. Every document on the WWW is given a unique address with which it can be addressed worldwide. This means that cross-references to other content can be easily made using links in a text.

In addition to e-mail and file transfer (FTP), the World Wide Web (WWW) is the most widely used service on the Internet. For this reason the term Internet is used synonymously for WWW. An Internet connection is required to access the WWW. The World Wide Web was released to the public since 1992.

The WWW is defined by the following points:

  • HTTP as the transmission protocol
  • Description language HTML
  • Hyperlinks (content cross-references)
  • unique addresses for individual documents (URLs)