30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web

“Vague but exciting.”

This was how Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s boss responded to his proposal titled “Information Management: A Proposal,” submitted on this day in 1989, when the inventor of the World Wide Web was a 33-year-old software engineer. Initially, Berners-Lee envisioned "a large hypertext database with typed links,"named “Mesh,” to help his colleagues at CERN (a large nuclear physics laboratory in Switzerland) share information amongst multiple computers.

Berners-Lee’s boss allowed him time to develop the humble flowchart into a working model, writing the HTML language, the HTTP application, and WorldWideWeb.app— the first Web browser and page editor. By 1991, the external Web servers were up and running.

The Web would soon revolutionize life as we know it, ushering in the information age. Today, there are nearly 2 billion websites online. Whether you use it for email, homework, gaming, or checking out videos of cute puppies, chances are you can’t imagine life without the Web.

Not to be confused with the internet, which had been evolving since the 1960s, the World Wide Web is an online application built upon innovations like HTML language, URL “addresses,” and hypertext transfer protocol, or HTTP. The Web has also become a decentralized community, founded on principles of universality, consensus, and bottom-up design.

“There are very few innovations that have truly changed everything,” said Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the World Wide Web Consortium. “The Web is the most impactful innovation of our time.”

Happy 30th Anniversary to the World Wide Web!

Explore the history of the invention of the World Wide Web on Google Arts & Culture, courtesy of The Science Museum and CERN.

World Wide Web (WWW)

Definition - What does World Wide Web (WWW) mean?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a network of online content that is formatted in HTML and accessed via HTTP. The term refers to all the interlinked HTML pages that can be accessed over the Internet. The World Wide Web was originally designed in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee while he was a contractor at CERN.

The World Wide Web is most often referred to simply as "the Web."

Explains World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web is what most people think of as the Internet. It is all the Web pages, pictures, videos and other online content that can be accessed via a Web browser. The Internet, in contrast, is the underlying network connection that allows us to send email and access the World Wide Web. The early Web was a collection of text-based sites hosted by organizations that were technically gifted enough to set up a Web server and learn HTML. It has continued to evolve since the original design, and it now includes interactive (social) media and user-generated content that requires little to no technical skills.

We owe the free Web to Berners-Lee and CERN’s decision to give away one of the greatest inventions of the century.