The World Wide Web (WWW) is the name given to the entire part of the Internet you can access with your web browser, it consists of millions of web sites and millions of web pages.

A web page is what you are looking at right now. Its like a word processing document but can contain pictures, sounds, movies and text. Web pages are made using HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language).

The difference between a web page and a web site is that a web site usually contains multiple web pages, all linked together. When a web page is made it can be linked to another page anywhere on the web. When a page is visited by a person, they can just click on the link and the visitor's computer automatically loads the linked site in the web browsers window.

Most people use links to help their sites' visitors find other useful sites. Links can connect different sites on different servers.

The idea for the Web was simple, provide a common format for documents stored on sever computers, and give each document a unique name (called a Universal Resource Locator / URL) that can be used by a browser program to locate and retrieve the document. Because URL's are long, they are represented as shorter hypertext links in other docments. The user of the browser just clicks the mouse on the link and the browser retrieves and displays the document named by the URL.

This idea was implemented by Timothy Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at CERN, the high energy physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, funded by the governments of participating European nations. Berners-Lee and Cailliau proposed to develop a system of links between different sources of information. Certain parts of a file would be made into nodes which when called up, would link the user to other related files. The pair devised a document format called Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) a variant of the Standard Generalized Mark-up language used in the publishing industry since the 1950's. It was released at CERN in May 1991, and in July 1992 a new Internet protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), was introduced to improve the efficiency of the document retrieval. Although the Web was originally intended to improve communications within the phyics community at CERN, it rapidly became the new "had to have" application for the Internet.

The  idea of hypertext was not new. One of the first demonstrations of a hypertext system, in which a user could click a mouse on a highlighted word in a document and immediately access a different part of the document (or another document entirely), occured at the 1967 Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. At this conference, Doughlas Englebart of SRI gave a demonstration of his NLS, which provided many of the capabalities of today's Web browsers. Englebart's Augment project was supported by funding from NASA and ARPA. Although it never became commercially successful, the mouse-driven user interfacr inspired researchers at Xerox PARC, who were developing personal computing technology.

Widespread use of the Web, which now accounts for the largest volume of Internet traffic, was accelerated by the development 1993 of the Mosaic graphical browser. This innovation, by Mac Andreessen at the NSF-funded National Centre for Supercomputer Applications, enabled the use of hyperlinks to video, audio, and graphics as well as text.

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