World Wide Web
- Date
- 1989-1991 · confidence high
- Place
- CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
- Credited to
- Tim Berners-Lee, with Robert Cailliau (CERN)
- People
- 👤 Robert Cailliau1947–👤 Tim Berners-Lee1955–
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
System of linked hypertext documents accessible over the internet via URLs, HTTP and HTML, released into the public domain in 1993. It turned the internet into a universal publishing medium.
Earlier hypertext systems (Xanadu, HyperCard, Gopher) and the 1980 ENQUIRE proposal; Berners-Lee's contribution is the open, royalty-free combination of URL, HTTP and HTML.
What it led to
- The information society, e-commerce and digital platforms
- The transformation of the press, advertising, education and politics
- The web as the interface of AI and a battleground for misinformation
Built on
- Hypertext and NLS (Mother of All Demos)1968
- TCP/IP protocol suite1974
- Domain Name System (DNS)1983
- hypertext (Nelson, Engelbart)
- SGML
Made possible
- Search engine (Archie, WebCrawler, AltaVista)1990-1995
- HTML markup language1991
- Mosaic graphical web browser1993
- HTTP cookiejunio de 1994
- Wiki and Wikipedia1995
- E-commerce (Amazon, eBay)1994-1995
- PageRank and Google1998
- Social network (SixDegrees, Friendster, Facebook)1997-2004
- Mosaic browser
- search engines
- social networks