August 1 is World Wide Web Day
Can you imagine life without the World Wide Web? Come celebrate one of the greatest modern inventions on World Wide Web day, August 1.
What would we do without the World Wide Web? Probably spending less time each day reading travel blogs or answering quizzes about which Taylor Swift album we are, to be sure, but the Web has changed so much of our modern life for the better that it’s hard to imagine life without it. This is why we celebrate World Wide Web day on August 1.
While the World Wide Web is often confused with the Internet, they are not the same things. The Web delivers different pages over the Internet, in the same way as your email uses the Internet to deliver messages between people. Prior to the advent of mobile phone applications and social media accounts, however, reading and posting on the Web was the way most people read content and interacted with each other online.
The World Wide Web was initially developed as a side-project by CERN contractor Tim Berners-Lee, as a method for staff to interact with other using hypertext.
The concept of hypertext itself – pages that contain links to other pages so they could be read in any order – had been around for decades prior, but was mired in a sea of conflicting operating systems and computer formats. Berners-Lee’s solution, while initially just for UNIX machines, opened the way for content to be delivered from a web server instead of local storage.
A short while later the first web browser was released for multiple computer platforms, which also functioned as a web site editing tool. This allowed people to publish content on one machine, store the resulting hypertext page on a web server, which could then be viewed by other users on their own machine later.
From there, the idea took on a life on its own. The ability to add images and sounds came along with the advent of the graphics-enabled web browsers of the mid-‘90s, and the number of web pages that existed online increased exponentially every month. Since then, we’ve never looked back and there are now hundreds of million websites online.
Today, on 1st August this year, thank Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau for laying the seed and foundation of the World Wide Web.
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You can find more information about WWW at World Wide Web Foundation and History of World Wide Web.
