World Wide Web

World Wide Web (Web) A computer-based information service developed at CERN in the early 1990s. It is a hypermedia system (see hypertext) distributed over a large number of computer sites that allows users to view and retrieve information from ‘documents’ containing ‘links’. It is accessed by a computer connected to the Internet that is running a suitable program.

Web documents may consist of textual material or a number of other forms, such as graphics, still or moving images, or audio clips. Within a document there will be material to be displayed and usually one or more links, which in a text document appear as highlighted words or phrases, or as icons. The links ‘point’ to other documents located elsewhere on the Web by means of a URL (universal resource locator), which contains information specifying, for example, the network address of the device holding the document and the local index entry for that document. Activating a link will result in the display of the requested document.