World-Wide Wait
<humour>
A pejorative expansion of WWW reflecting on the slowness of some network connections and sites.
Last updated: 1997-03-30
World-Wide Web
<web, networking, hypertext>
(WWW, W3, the web) A client-server hypertext distributed information retrieval system. The web is one application carried by the Internet (network), other examples being e-mail, DNS, SSH).
Basically, the web consists of documents or web pages in HTML format (a kind of hypertext), each of which has a unique URL or "web address". Links in a page are URLs of other pages which may be part of the same website or a page on another site on a different web server anywhere on the Internet. As well as HTML pages, a URL may refer to an image, some code (JavaScript or Java), CSS, a video stream or other kinds of object. URLs typically start with "http://", indicating that the page needs to be fetched using the HTTP protocol or or "https://" for the HTTPS protocol which encrypts the request and the resulting page for security. The URL "scheme" (the bit before the ":") indicates the protocol to use. These include FTP, the original protocol for transferring files over the Internet. RTSP is a streaming protocol that allow a continuous feed of audio or video from the server to the browser. Gopher was a predecessor of HTTP and Telnet starts an interactive command-line session with a remote server. The web is accessed using a client program known as a web browser that runs on the user's computer. The browser fetches and displays pages and allows the user to follow links by clicking on them (or similar action) and to input queries to the server. A variety of browsers are freely available, e.g. Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox. Early browsers included NCSA Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. Queries can be entered into "forms" which allow the user to enter arbitrary text and select options from customisable menus and other controls. The server processes each request - either a simple URL or data from a form - and returns a response, typically a page of HTML. The World-Wide Web originated from the CERN High-Energy Physics laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland. In the early 1990s, the developers at CERN spread word of the Web's capabilities to scientific and academic audiences worldwide. By September 1993, the share of Web traffic on the NSFNET Internet backbone reached 75 gigabytes per month or one percent. By July 1994 it was one terabyte per month. The World Wide Web Consortium is the main standards body for the web. Following the widespread availability of web browsers and servers from about 1995, organisations started using the same software and protocols on their own private internal TCP/IP networks giving rise to the term "intranet". This dictionary is accessible via the Web at http://foldoc.org/. An article by John December. W3 servers, clients and tools.Last updated: 2017-11-01
World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) The main standards body for the web. W3C works with the global community to establish international standards for client and server protocols that enable on-line commerce and communications on the Internet. It also produces reference software.
W3C was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 1994-10-25. Netscape Communications Corporation was a founding member. The Consortium is run by MIT LCS and INRIA, in collaboration with CERN where the web originated. W3C is funded by industrial members but its products are freely available to all. The director is Sir Tim Berners-Lee who invented the web at the Center for European Particle Research (CERN). Despite being a web consortium that is world-wide and not a world consortium for the "wide web", they have chosen to omit the hyphen that might be expected of a standards body, especially one directed by a Berners-Lee. http://w3.org/.Last updated: 2019-12-22
World Wide Web Worm
<web>
(WWWW) One of the first automatic indexing tools for the web, being developed in September 1994 by Oliver McBryan <[email protected]> at the University of Colorado. The worm created a database of 300,000 multimedia objects which can be obtained or searched for keywords via the web.
http://cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html.Last updated: 1996-05-19
Nearby terms:
World Time ♦ World-Wide Wait ♦ World-Wide Web ♦ World Wide Web Consortium
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