What even is the “World Wide Web?”
In the early days of the consumer internet, you had to type “www.” at the beginning of URLs. You probably know that it stands for World Wide Web. What you might not know is the World Wide Web and the internet aren’t the exact same thing, even though the words “internet” and “web” get used interchangeably.
Towards the end of the 60s, the US military started working on a system that would let different computers work together with each other at the same time. Everyone agreed this was a cool idea, and soon governments, business, and academics started working on their own systems which, together, would eventually form the internet.
To be really useful, those systems needed to work interoperable, so the world needed a standard way for computers to communicate. Enter a guy named Tim Berners Lee, who came up with the World Wide Web in 1991. The Web is a system which lets computers use a web browser to access documents and files that are stored on servers using the internet, and communicate in a way that’s seamless and interoperable so everyone can build on each other’s work. It includes a number of different standards , including the aforementioned HTML, HTTP, and URLs.
