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World Wide Web

The World Wide Web was invented by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while working at CERN



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What is W3?

The World Wide Web (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.

Everything there is online about W3 is linked directly or indirectly to this document, including an executive summary of the project, Mailing lists , Policy , November's W3 news , Frequently Asked Questions.

Tim Berners-Lee

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an Internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as web technology spread.

He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization founded in 1994 that develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a founding Director of the Web Science Trust (WST) launched in 2009 to promote research and education in Web Science, the multidisciplinary study of humanity connected by technology. Berners-Lee is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

At MIT, Berners-Lee is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL). He is also a Professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.

In 2001 Berners-Lee became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth, and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit.

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Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau is most well known for the proposal, developed with Tim Berners-Lee, of a hypertext system for accessing documentation, which eventually led to the creation of the World Wide Web.
In 1992, Cailliau produced the first Web browser for the Apple Macintosh. In 1993, Cailliau started "WISE", the first Web-based project at the European Commission (DGXIII) together with the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft. Cailliau also started the authentication scheme for the Web and supervised its implementation. He worked with CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) to produce and get the document approved whereby CERN placed the web technology into the public domain.

Cailliau was one of the co-founders of the International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2) after successfully organizing the first conference in 1994. During 1995, he was active in the transfer of the WWW development effort and the standards activities from CERN to the Web Consortium W3C. He then started, with the European Commission, the Web for Schools project, which has given support and access to 150 schools in the European Union.

"Two of them have developed the web: an Englishman named Tim Berners-Lee, and a brilliant Belgian scientist who has been forgotten, Robert Cailliau."