World Wide Web

Hyperlinking system, also known as WWW or W3, that creates a point-and-click way of linking within documents, linking to other documents, and extremely popular searching of the Internet. Whereas the Internet commenced in 1969 with the linking of the Pentagon with four supercomputing centers at universities, the WWW was conceived in 1990 by particle physicists (notably Tim Berners-Lee) at CERN in Switzerland. The CERN group developed the HTML WWW coding language and the HTTP protocols for reading HTML at WWW sites. In 1993 there were only 50 WWW sites (mostly particle physicists) that exploded to nearly 10 million sites shortly after Mosaic and then Netscape added HTTP to browsers. Internet use has exploded in commerce, entertainment, and education since the advent of the WWW. Millions of individuals and organizations are setting up web sites (home pages). Web publishing is overtaking hard copy publishing. WWW shopping and education alternatives are exploding. Students can set up free web sites at <http://www.tripod.com/>. Virtual Servers Inc., for a monthly fee, will provide web server space to business firms and other parties wanting to set up network application servers. The Virtual Server home page is <http://vservers.com/>. For interactive computing on the web, see Distributed Network Computing.  Software options for 3-D rendering on the web are reviewed in the NewMedia, May 5 1998, pp. 52-64. The NewMedia web site is at http://www.newmedia.com Those authoring packages rated as "Awesome" include Live Picture Reality Studio at http://www.livepicture.com (800-724-7900) and Platinum Technology VRCreator at http://www.platinum.com (800-442-6861).  There are many other options rated as "Thumbs Up" or "Does the Job." (See also AVI, Browser, Internet, Cookies, Image map, FAQ, Finger, FTP, HTML, HTTP, Hyperlink, IRC, ISDN, ISP, Java, Smart agent, TCP/IP, Telnet, USENet, WAIS, Apple AV, Audio, JPEG, MIME, MUDs, PDA, QuickTime, Resource Description Framework, Search engine, and Web browsers)