The Birth of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is the layer of linked pages that turned the internet from a specialist tool into something everyone could use. It was invented at a physics laboratory, given away for free, and it changed the world in barely a decade.

The internet before the World Wide Web

By the late 1980s the internet already existed and worked well, but it was not the friendly place we know now. It connected researchers, universities and engineers, and using it meant mastering separate tools for email, file transfer and remote logins, each with its own commands. Information was out there, but finding and reading it was awkward. What was missing was a simple, unified way to publish documents and link them together.

That missing piece became the World Wide Web. It is important to be precise here: the Web is not the internet. The internet is the underlying network that moves data between computers, addressed by IP addresses. The Web is a service that runs on top of it. You can read how the network itself came to be in our history of the internet.

An idea born at CERN

The Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist working at CERN, the large physics laboratory straddling the border of Switzerland and France. CERN was home to thousands of researchers using many incompatible computer systems, and keeping track of who was working on what, and where the relevant documents lived, was a genuine headache. Around 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for a system of linked documents to solve exactly that problem.

His insight was to combine an old idea, hypertext, in which words can link directly to other documents, with the reach of the internet. Instead of links that only worked within one computer, these links could point to documents on any machine anywhere on the network. Follow a link, and your software would fetch the page from wherever it lived.

The three inventions that made the Web work

To turn the proposal into reality, Berners-Lee created three technologies that still underpin every web page today.

The first is HTML, the HyperText Markup Language, a simple way to write a page and mark up its headings, paragraphs and, crucially, its links. The second is HTTP, the HyperText Transfer Protocol, the set of rules a browser and a server use to request and hand over a page. The third is the URL, the uniform address that gives every page a unique location so a link can point at it. Behind the scenes, a URL's human-friendly name is turned into a numeric address by DNS, the internet's naming system.

The first browser, server and website

To prove the idea, Berners-Lee also wrote the first web browser and the first web server, and put up the first website, which explained what the Web was and how to use it. This all came together around 1990 and 1991. In these earliest days the whole Web ran on a single computer at CERN, and the number of websites in existence could be counted on your fingers.

The early browser was text-and-link focused, but the concept was immediately compelling: click a link, and a document from another machine appeared. For the first time, information scattered across the internet could be browsed as a single connected web rather than a set of isolated islands.

Set free: the Web opens to everyone

The decision that truly launched the Web was not technical but generous. In the early 1990s, CERN placed the Web's underlying technology into the public domain, letting anyone use and build on it freely, with no licensing fees. This openness meant that programmers everywhere could write their own browsers and servers and put up their own sites without asking permission.

Soon after, graphical browsers appeared that could show images alongside text and were easy for newcomers to install and use. They turned the Web from a researcher's curiosity into something colourful and inviting. The number of websites began to double and redouble, and the Web spilled out of universities into homes, schools and businesses.

Why the Web changed everything

Within a few years, the World Wide Web became the reason most people wanted to get online at all. It gave the underlying internet a face, and it did so on open, royalty-free foundations that anyone could build upon. That openness is why the Web could host everything from personal pages to encyclopaedias to, yes, a whole zoo of animal-themed sites that show you your own address.

Every website you visit, including this one, is still built from the same three inventions Berners-Lee dreamed up at CERN. If you would like to see the internet layer that carries all of it working right now, the checkers at IP Animals will read back the public IP address your browser is using.