WorldWideWeb

Infobox Software
name = WorldWideWeb



caption = WorldWideWeb, c.1993
developer = Sir Tim Berners-Lee for CERN
released = February 26, 1991
frequently_updated = yes
programming language = Objective-C
operating system = NeXTSTEP
language = ?
genre = Web browser
license = Public domain
website = [http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html www.w3.org/.../WorldWideWeb.html]

WorldWideWeb was the world's first web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor. It was introduced on February 26, 1991 by British scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, and ran on the NeXTSTEP platform. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb (WWW) was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

The source code was released into the public domain in 1993. [ [http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/ Index of /History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation] ] [ [http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#browser What were the first WWW browsers?] ] Some of the code still resides on Berners-Lee's NeXTcube in the CERN museum and has not been able to be recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact.

History

Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT Computer during the second half of 1990, while working for CERN. The first successful build was completed on December 25, 1990, and successive builds circulated among Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN before being released to the public, by way of Internet newsgroups, in August 1991. By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, and graduate student Nicola Pellow - who wrote the line-mode browser - were involved in the project.

Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into a C programming language version, creating the libwww API.

A number of early browsers appeared, notably ViolaWWW. They were all eclipsed by Mosaic in terms of popularity, which by 1993, had replaced the WorldWideWeb program. Those involved in its creation had moved on to other tasks, such as defining standards and guidelines for the further development of the World Wide Web—e.g. HTML, various communication protocols, and so on.

On April 30, 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain, making it free software. Several versions of the software are still available to download from [http://browsers.evolt.org/?worldwideweb/NeXT evolt.org's browser archive] . Berners-Lee initially considered releasing it under the GNU General Public License, but eventually opted for public domain to maximise corporate support. [cite web|url=http://www.governingwithcode.org/case_studies/pdf/NCSAmosaic.pdf|title=History of Libwww|page=3|format=PDF]

Technical information

Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for the NeXTSTEP platform, the program used many of NeXTSTEP's components—WorldWideWeb's layout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Text class.

Features

WorldWideWeb was capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading and opening any file type supported by the NeXT system (which included PostScript, movies, sounds, and so on), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. At first, images were displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class supported Image objects.

The browser was also an editor. It allowed the simultaneous editing and linking of many pages in different windows. The functions "Mark Selection", which created an anchor, and "Link to Marked", which made the selected text an anchor linking to the last marked anchor, allowed the creation of links. Editing pages remotely was not yet possible, as the HTTP PUT method had not yet been implemented. Files would be edited in a local file system which was in turn served onto the web by an HTTP server.

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contained Next and Previous buttons that would automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited; i.e., if one navigated to a page from a table of links, the Previous button would cause the browser to load the previous page linked in the table. This was useful for web pages which contained lists of links. Many still do, but the user interface link-chaining was not adopted by other browser writers, and it disappeared. An equivalent functionality is nowadays provided by connecting webpages with explicit navigation buttons repeated on each webpage among those links. This places more of a burden on web site designers and developers, but allows them to control the presentation of the navigation links.

See also

*List of web browsers
*Comparison of web browsers

External links

* [http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb]
* [http://www.w3.org/History.html A Little History of the World Wide Web]
* [http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4 Berners-Lee's blog]
*"Weaving the Web" (ISBN 0-06-251587-X), Berners-Lee's book about the conception of the Web
*Nexus [http://browsers.evolt.org/?worldwideweb/ binaries] and [http://www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/ source]
* [http://info.cern.ch/ CERN, Where the Web Was "WWW" born]

References