WWW" and "The web" redirect here. For other uses of WWW, see WWW (disambiguation). For other uses of web, see Web (disambiguation).
The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[1] commonly known as the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist and former CERN employee,[2] and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau are considered the inventors of the Web.[3][4][5][6] On March 12, 1989,[7] Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.[8] The 1989 proposal was meant for a more effective CERN communication system but Berners-Lee eventually realised the concept could be implemented throughout the world.[9] Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will",[10] and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December of that year.[11] The first test was completed around 20 December 1990 and Berners-Lee reported about the project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext on 7 August 1991.[12]