NWE Help: Web: Intro: the Web

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The World Wide Web is a universe of network-accessible information, an assemblage of images and texts from education, government, and commerce, all connected through a common information exchange protocol. It is an initiative started in 1993 by CERN (a collective of European high-energy physics researchers), now with many participants around the globe. The Web uses hypertext and multimedia techniques to make the web easy for anyone to contribute to, roam, and browse.

The web has grown a lot since 1994--it's a lot more (or less, some would say) than a network used to interchange scientific information. Read the FAQs on the web for more historical perspective.

The operation of the web relies on hypertext as its means of interacting with users. Hypertext is basically the same as regular text--it can be stored, read, searched, or edited--with an important addition: hypertext contains connections within the text to other documents. Any word or image can function as a link to another text, image, video, or sound file.