The world wide web (www) is a collection of globally distributed text and multimedia documents in addition to other network services linked in ways as to create a vast electronic library from which information can be retrieved quickly by using searches. The Web represents the application of hypertext technology and a graphical interface to the Internet to retrieve information that is contained in specially formatted documents that might reside in the same computer or be distributed among several computers across the world. It consists of three main elements, the hypertext markup language (HTML) comprises the programming codes that define fonts, layouts and links to other documents accessible by the Web. The hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) defines a set of standards for transmitting Web pages across the internet. The universal resource locator (URL) is a standard naming system for identifying a Web file. The result is called the Web because it is made up of millions of sites which are all linked together with users traveling from one site to the next by clicking a mouse on a web site. Although each page is an Internet site it must be accessed through a special program called a Web browser, which can translate the HTML into the graphical images, text, and links made by the creator of the particular page.
The foundation of what we now think of as the Web originated with work done on the fetching of information from distributed systems by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics during the 80's. This culminated in the introduction of a browser to the scientific community in 1990 and to the public in 91. Because of the difficulty of using this version acceptance outside the scientific and academic communities was minimal. Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate student had developed a graphical browser for the Web, introducing a UNIX version in 1993. Versions for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems followed in 1994, and acceptance of the World Wide Web increased quickly. In the late 90s the development of improved browsers with greater multimedia functionality and privacy as well as having more powerful search engineswhich were capable of indexing the incresingly greater information on the Web which led to the commercialization of the Internet.
