world wide web
The Web was invented by English computer scientist?Tim Berners-Lee?at?CERN, and originally conceived as a document management system.?The first proposal was written in 1989,?and a working system implemented by the end of 1990 including?the World WideWeb browser?and?an HTTP server.]?The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the general public on 23rd August 1991. The Web was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years,?there were 50 websites created.[12][13]
CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use.[14][15]?After the?NCSA?released?Mosaic?later that year, the Web became very popular with?thousands of websites?springing up in less than a year.?Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit?forms, and?HTTPd, a server that could process forms (see?CGI).?Marc Andreessen?and?Jim Clark?founded?Netscape?the following year and released?Navigator, which introduced?Java?and?JavaScript?to the Web. It quickly became the dominant browser. Netscape?became a public company?in 1995 which triggered a frenzy for the Web and started the?dot-com bubble.?Microsoft responded by developing its own browser,?Internet Explorer. By bundling it with Windows, it became the dominant browser for 14 years.
Tim Berners-Lee founded the?World Wide Web Consortium?(W3C) which created?XML?in 1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter?XHTML.[22]?In the meantime, developers began exploiting an IE feature called?XMLH ttpRequest?to make?Ajax?applications and launched the?Web 2.0?revolution.?Mozilla,?Opera, and Apple rejected XHTML and created the?WHATWG?which developed?HTML5.?In 2009, the W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML?and in 2019, ceded control of the HTML specification to the WHATWG.
The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the?Information Age?and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the?Internet.