The World Wide Web was developed a few years ago by researchers at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. The Web is hard to describe or quantify. It is not a thing, but rather a collection of elements. But there are no physical connections between the elements, nor is there any way of determining exactly what all the elements are.
Think about all the papers you store in your files. Most people have a personal filing system that includes a collection of containers -- often folders, drawers, or milk crates. Each paper gets filed in one of these containers. If the paper is relevant to more than one file, it must be physically reproduced if it is to be stored in more than one container. And if a paper is relevant to the work you do both at home and in your office, you may have to keep copies in both sets of files. In reality most people don't make multiple copies of every paper and store it in every file in which it might be somewhat relevant. Instead they just try to remember where the one copy is filed. But the more papers you have, and the more interrelated your files are, the harder this is. So imagine you connected all related papers with string. Each paper could have as many strings as were necessary to attach it to all other related papers. This would make it very easy for you to find things -- that is as long as you didn't get tangled up in all the strings.
The World Wide Web is like a filing system connected by strings. Except the strings are not physical, and the files include all files that anyone in the world wants to make public. The virtual strings are really addresses called Uniform Resource Locaters (URLs). By typing a URL onto an online document, you can effectively link that document to any other public online document -- thus adding your document to the Web.
Because anyone can add to the Web at any time, the contents of the Web are constantly changing. At the end of 1993 there were about 600 computers around the world that had documents linked to the Web. A year later there were over 11,000 computers on the Web. Currently there are probably between 50 and 100 new computers being added to the Web every day. And each of these computers may have hundreds or even thousands of users who provide public documents.
In order to help people wade through all these virtual strings, people have created Web browsers such as Mosaic, Netscape, and Lynx. Most of these browsers have easy-to-use interfaces that allow people to easily jump from link to link, hopping around the world without leaving their desks. Most Web browsers allow people to retrieve files using a variety of programs -- including Gopher, FTP, and the Web's on HTTP -- without requiring the user to have any special knowledge about these programs.
Last update 26 February 1996
http://www.ccrc.wustl.edu/spj/surf/www.html
Prepared by Lorrie Faith Cranor (lorracks@cs.wustl.edu) and Staci D. Kramer (sdk@cris.com)