The World Wide Web

What exactly is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is a global, open, and free information system that runs on the Internet. It's decentralised, meaning there is no single, controlling authority to answer to. Anyone in the world can share information on the Web, even from their own bedroom should they choose to do so.

A single document on the web is called a web page, and a collection of documents published by an organisation is a web site.

The structure of the information on the web is entirely free-form: web pages contain hyperlinks which allow the reader to jump immediately to any other page written by anyone else in the world.

How did all of this start?

The Web was first created by a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s.