Definition of www
Have you ever wondered where the term “www” came from? Why do people refer to websites with their “www” prefix?

We will give you the exact definition of www and how it came about, and then we will tell you something interesting about it that nobody seems to know or even care about!

www Definition

The term www (or “double-u double-u double-u”) stands for the “World Wide Web.”

The World Wide Web (or simply the Web) is an information-sharing network that consists of interlinked hypertext documents accessible through the Internet.

It is a vast global information system which is open to anybody and everybody with access to the Internet.

The Web comprises millions of web pages (known as Web documents or HTML pages) which may contain text, graphics, audio and video. These pages are written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML), which uses special codes or tags to describe how information should be displayed on your computer screen.

The Web has become an integral part of modern life for information-sharing and collaboration on a massive scale. It is estimated that the number of websites has exceeded 2,000 million, with a growth rate of more than 10% per year.

History

The World Wide Web is an information retrieval system developed at CERN in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist.

It was initially designed to help scientists share data across different geographical locations.

Berners-Lee published the first web page in 1991 while working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It was available through FTP in what he called the “info” directory. By 1993, Berners-Lee had expanded the concept into a worldwide hypertext project, and it was moved to its domain name: www.

The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer [1].

In 2013, CERN launched an initiative to restore the first website ever created. The site is called info.cern.ch. [2]

This is how the first web page looks like [3].

the first web page

Who uses www?

www is used by all websites that want to be found more easily on search engines such as Google or Bing. It’s also used by many businesses and organisations who wish for a domain name more accessible for people to remember than their actual URL address.

What is the difference between the www and the Internet?

The www is often confused with the Internet itself, but they aren’t the same thing.

The Internet is a network of computers and devices connected through phone lines or wireless signals. The www is one part of this network.

The Internet allows you to connect to other computers worldwide. You can use the Internet to send and receive emails, browse websites and download files.

Conclusion

www conclusion
This short blog aims to give you a clear idea about what the www prefix means and to understand this concept.

References

[1] “The birth of the Web.” CERN Accelerating science, home.cern/science/computing/birth-web. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

[2] “http://info.cern.ch – home of the first website.” info.cern.ch/. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.

[3] “World Wide Web.” http://info.cern.ch – home of the first website, info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Accessed 21 Nov. 2022.