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Tim Berners-Lee is credited with having created the World Wide Web while he was a researcher at the European High-Energy Particle Physics lab (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee was interested in developing a tool to enable collaboration between physicists and other researchers in the high-energy physics community. Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a hypertext tool and circulated his proposal for comments at CERN in 1989. The proposal was further refined in 1990 and three new technologies were incorporated into the proposal—Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) used to write Web documents, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used to transmit the Web documents across the Internet, and a Web browser client software program to receive and interpret data and display results. An important concept of his proposal included the fact that the client software program's user interface would be consistent across all types of computer platforms so that users could access information from many types of computers. By 1991, the information-sharing system using HTML, HTTP, and a client software program was fully operational on the multiplatform computer network at the CERN laboratories in Switzerland. All of the documents coded with HTML elements were stored on one main computer at CERN. This special type of computer was called a Web server because it “served-up” batches of cross-linked HTML documents. At first there was only one Web server located at CERN, but by the end of 1992 there were over 50 Web servers in the world. Many of these earliest Web servers were located at universities or other research centers. Tim Berners-Lee is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (see Berners-Lee, 1999).
In 1993 Marc Andreesen led a team that developed the graphic interface browser called Mosaic while he was an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on a project for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). Version 1.0 of Mosaic was released in September 1993 for the Windows, Macintosh, and X Windows System platforms. Popularity of the graphical user interface (GUI) browser was immediate. People without computer expertise were able to use the graphical interface and just point and click to navigate the World Wide Web. Marc Andreesen later left NCSA and formed Netscape Communication Corporation.
The World Wide Web Consortium was created in October 1994 to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability. The W3C has about 500 member organizations from all over the world and has earned international recognition for its contributions to the growth of the Web. By promoting interoperability and encouraging an open forum for discussion, W3C commits to leading the technical evolution of the Web. In less than 10 years, the W3C has developed more than forty technical specifications for the Web's infrastructure. W3C technologies help make the Web a robust, scalable, and adaptive infrastructure for a universe of information resources. You can find the W3C at http://www.w3.org/.
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