<P> The World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or the Web) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet . English scientist Tim Berners - Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 . He wrote the first web browser computer program in 1990 while employed at CERN in Switzerland . The Web browser was released outside of CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and to the general public on the Internet in August 1991 . </P> <P> 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 . Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, audio, and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content . </P> <P> Embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages . Multiple web pages with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website . Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactively where users contribute content or the content depends upon the users or their actions . Websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial, governmental, or non-governmental organisational purposes . </P> <P> Tim Berners - Lee's vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s . By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe and the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being . In 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners - Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web - like system at CERN . In March 1989 Berners - Lee issued a proposal to the management at CERN for a system called "Mesh" that referenced ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, which used the term "web" and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded in readable text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document you could skip to them with a click of the mouse ." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word hypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s . There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners - Lee goes on to use the term hypermedia . </P>

Types of information in the world wide web