WorldWideWeb

Last updated
WorldWideWeb
Developer(s) Tim Berners-Lee for CERN
Initial release25 December 1990;33 years ago (1990-12-25) [1]
Final release
0.18  OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 1994;30 years ago (1994)
Repository
Written in Objective-C [1]
Operating system NeXTSTEP [1]
Available inEnglish
Type Web browser, Web authoring tool
License Public-domain software
Website w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) is the first web browser [1] and web page editor. [2] It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

Contents

The source code was released into the public domain on 30 April 1993. [3] [4] Some of the code still resides on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT Computer in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact. [5] To coincide with the 20th anniversary of the research center giving the web to the world, a project began in 2013 at CERN to preserve this original hardware and software associated with the birth of the Web. [6]

History

Tim Berners-Lee wrote what would become known as WorldWideWeb on a NeXT Computer [4] during the second half of 1990, while working for CERN, a European nuclear research agency. The first edition was completed "some time before" 25 December 1990, according to Berners-Lee, after two months of development. [7] The browser was announced on the newsgroups and became available to the general public in August 1991. [7] [8] By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, [9] and visiting undergraduate student Nicola Pellow – who later wrote the Line Mode Browser – were involved in the project. [7]

Berners-Lee considered different names for his new application, including The Mine of Information and The Information Mesh, before publicly launching the WorldWideWeb browser in 1991. [10] When a new version was released in 1994, it was renamed Nexus Browser, in order to differentiate between the software (WorldWideWeb) and the World Wide Web. [11]

The team created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems. Porting to the X Window System was not possible as nobody on the team had experience with the X Window System. [2]

Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into a C programming language version, creating the libwww API. [12]

A number of early browsers appeared, notably ViolaWWW. They were all eclipsed by Mosaic in terms of popularity, which by 1993 had replaced the WorldWideWeb program. Those involved in its creation had moved on to other tasks, such as defining standards and guidelines for the further development of the World Wide Web (e.g. HTML, and various communication protocols).[ citation needed ]

On 30 April 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain. Several versions of the software are still available on the web in various states. [13] Berners-Lee initially considered releasing it under the GNU General Public License, but after hearing rumors that companies might balk at the concept if any licensing issues were involved, he eventually opted to release it into the public domain. [14] In 2021, Sotheby's held an auction for an NFT of the WorldWideWeb source code. [15] [16]

Features

Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for the NeXTSTEP platform, the program uses many of NeXTSTEP's components – WorldWideWeb's layout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Text class. [1]

WorldWideWeb is capable of displaying basic style sheets, [4] downloading and opening any file type with a MIME type that is also supported by the NeXT system (PostScript, [2] [4] movies, and sounds [4] ), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. In earlier versions, images are displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class gained support for Image objects. [4] WorldWideWeb is able to use different protocols: FTP, HTTP, NNTP, and local files. Later versions are able to display inline images. [1]

The browser is also a WYSIWYG editor. [1] [2] It allows the simultaneous editing and linking of many pages in different windows. The functions "Mark Selection", which creates an anchor, and "Link to Marked", which makes the selected text an anchor linking to the last marked anchor, allow the creation of links. Editing pages remotely is not possible, as the HTTP PUT method had not yet been implemented during the period of the application's active development. [1] Files can be edited in a local file system which is in turn served onto the Web by an HTTP server.[ citation needed ]

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contains Next and Previous buttons that automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, similar to Opera's Rewind and Fast Forward buttons, or HyperCard; i.e., if one navigated to a page from a table of links, the Previous button would cause the browser to load the previous page linked in the table. [1] This is useful for web pages which contain lists of links. Many still do, but the user interface link-chaining was not adopted by other contemporary browser writers, and it only gained popularity later. An equivalent functionality is nowadays provided by connecting web pages with explicit navigation buttons repeated on each webpage among those links, or with typed links in the headers of the page. This places more of a burden on web site designers and developers, but allows them to control the presentation of the navigation links.[ citation needed ]

WorldWideWeb does not have bookmarks as they exist in later browsers, but a similar feature was provided: to save a link for later use, users could link to it from their own home page (start page). Users could create multiple home pages, similar to folders in modern web browsers' bookmarks. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim Berners-Lee</span> English computer scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web (born 1955)

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Wide Web</span> Linked hypertext system on the Internet

The World Wide Web is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NeXTSTEP</span> Operating system from NeXT Computer

NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer, founded by Steve Jobs, in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprietary workstation computers such as the NeXTcube. It was later ported to several other computer architectures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mosaic (web browser)</span> Early web browser (1993–1997)

NCSA Mosaic is a discontinued web browser, and one of the first to be widely available. It was instrumental in popularizing the World Wide Web and the general Internet by integrating multimedia such as text and graphics. It was named for its support of multiple Internet protocols, such as Hypertext Transfer Protocol, File Transfer Protocol, Network News Transfer Protocol, and Gopher. Its intuitive interface, reliability, personal computer support, and simple installation all contributed to its popularity within the web. Mosaic is the first browser to display images inline with text instead of in a separate window. It is often described as the first graphical web browser, though it was preceded by WorldWideWeb, the lesser-known Erwise, and ViolaWWW.

NeXT Computer is a workstation computer that was developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It was introduced in October 1988 as the company's first and flagship product, at a price of US$6,500, aimed at the higher-education market. It was designed around the Motorola 68030 CPU and 68882 floating-point coprocessor, with a clock speed of 25 MHz. Its NeXTSTEP operating system is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD-derived Unix, with a proprietary GUI using a Display PostScript-based back end. According to the Science Museum Group, "The enclosure consists of a 1-foot die-cast magnesium cube-shaped black case, which led to the machine being informally referred to as 'The Cube.'"

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ViolaWWW</span> Popular web browser in the early 1990s

ViolaWWW is a discontinued web browser, the first to support scripting and stylesheets for the World Wide Web (WWW). It was first released in 1991/1992 for Unix and acted as the recommended browser at CERN, where the WWW was invented, but eventually lost its position as most frequently used browser to Mosaic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Cailliau</span> Belgian engineer, computer scientist, and co-inventor of the World Wide Web

Robert Cailliau is a Belgian informatics engineer who proposed the first (pre-www) hypertext system for CERN in 1987 and collaborated with Tim Berners-Lee on the World Wide Web from before it got its name. He designed the historical logo of the WWW, organized the first International World Wide Web Conference at CERN in 1994 and helped transfer Web development from CERN to the global Web consortium in 1995. He is listed as co-author of How the Web Was Born by James Gillies, the first book-length account of the origins of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Line Mode Browser</span> Command-line web browser

The Line Mode Browser is the second web browser ever created. The browser was the first demonstrated to be portable to several different operating systems. Operated from a simple command-line interface, it could be widely used on many computers and computer terminals throughout the Internet. The browser was developed starting in 1990, and then supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an example and test application for the libwww library.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Interface Builder</span> Developer Application for MacOS

Interface Builder is a software development application for Apple's macOS operating system. It is part of Xcode, the Apple Developer developer's toolset. Interface Builder allows Cocoa and Carbon developers to create interfaces for applications using a graphical user interface. The resulting interface is stored as a .nib file, short for NeXT Interface Builder, or more recently, as an XML-based .xib file.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NeXTcube</span> Workstation computer by NeXT

The NeXTcube is a high-end workstation computer developed, manufactured, and sold by NeXT from 1990 to 1993. It superseded the original NeXT Computer workstation and is housed in a similar cube-shaped magnesium enclosure, designed by frog design. The workstation runs the NeXTSTEP operating system and was launched with a $7,995 list price.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Libwww</span>

Libwww is an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for web browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), released libwww in late 1992, comprising reusable code from the first browsers.

Nicola Pellow is an English mathematician and information scientist who was one of the nineteen members of the WWW Project at CERN working with Tim Berners-Lee. She joined the project in November 1990, while an undergraduate maths student enrolled on a sandwich course at Leicester Polytechnic. Pellow recalled having little experience with programming languages, "... apart from using a bit of Pascal and FORTRAN as part of my degree course."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of the World Wide Web</span> Information system running in the Internet

The World Wide Web is a global information medium that users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly further than that of the World Wide Web.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erwise</span> Discontinued graphical web browser

Erwise is an early discontinued web browser, and the first that was available for the X Window System.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MacWWW</span>

MacWWW, also known as Samba, is an early minimalist web browser from 1992 meant to run on Macintosh computers. It was the first web browser for the classic Mac OS platform, and the first for any non-Unix operating system. MacWWW tries to emulate the design of WorldWideWeb. Unlike modern browsers it opens each link in a new window only after a double-click. It was a commercial product from CERN and cost 50 European Currency Units

A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. It further provides for the capture or input of information which may be returned to the presenting system, then stored or processed as necessary. The method of accessing a particular page or content is achieved by entering its address, known as a Uniform Resource Identifier or URI. This may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve and view documents and other resources on the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CERN httpd</span> Early web server

CERN httpd is an early, now discontinued, web server (HTTP) daemon originally developed at CERN from 1990 onwards by Tim Berners-Lee, Ari Luotonen and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. Implemented in C, it was the first web server software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">First International Conference on the World-Wide Web</span>

The First International Conference on the World-Wide Web was the first-ever conference about the World Wide Web, and the first meeting of what became the International World Wide Web Conference. It was held on May 25 to 27, 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. The conference had 380 participants, who were accepted out of 800 applicants. It has been referred to as the "Woodstock of the Web".

tkWWW Web browser and editor

tkWWW is an early, now discontinued web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor written by Joseph Wang at MIT as part of Project Athena and the Globewide Network Academy project. The browser was based on the Tcl language and the Tk (toolkit) extension but did not achieve broad user-acceptance or market share, although it was included in many Linux distributions by default. Joseph Wang wanted tkWWW to become a replacement for r r n and to become a "swiss army knife" of networked computing.

ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Berners-Lee, Tim. "The WorldWideWeb browser". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 23 July 2010.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Petrie, Charles; Cailliau, Robert (November 1997). "Interview Robert Cailliau on the WWW Proposal: "How It Really Happened."". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Archived from the original on 6 January 2011. Retrieved 18 August 2010.
  3. ↑ "The document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993". CERN. 1993. Retrieved 26 September 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Berners-Lee, Tim. "Frequently asked questions – What were the first WWW browsers?". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 22 July 2010.
  5. ↑ "The birth of the Web | CERN". home.cern. Retrieved 2019-07-21.
  6. ↑ Ghosh, Pallab (22 April 2013). "Cern re-creating first web page to revere early ideals". BBC News. Retrieved 30 April 2013.
  7. 1 2 3 Berners-Lee, Tim (1993). "A Brief History of the Web". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 17 August 2010.
  8. ↑ "A Little History of the World Wide Web". www.w3.org. Retrieved 2020-02-03.
  9. ↑ Jean-François Groff. "NeXT editor upgrade proposal". World Wide Web Consortium . Retrieved 21 June 2010.
  10. ↑ "Welcome to info.cern.ch". CERN. Retrieved 25 July 2010.
  11. ↑ Boulton, Jim. "The Nexus Browser | Digital Archaeology" . Retrieved 2021-06-15.
  12. ↑ Stewart, Bill. "Web Browser History". Living Internet. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  13. ↑ "browsers.evolt.org". browsers.evolt.org.
  14. ↑ "History of Libwww" (PDF). p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2009-09-16. Retrieved 2007-02-14.
  15. ↑ "Source Code for the WWW | This Changed Everything: Source Code for WWW x Tim Berners-Lee, an NFT | 2021".
  16. ↑ "Tim Berners-Lee sells web source code NFT for $5.4m". 30 June 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.