1. A vast communications network among computers around the world, based largely on the notions of democratic (ideally, universal) access, and the linking of information by hyperlinks.
2. The internet.
SYN. web, WWW.
The total set of interlinked hypertext documents residing on HTTP servers all around the world. Documents on the World Wide Web, called pages or Web pages, are written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), identified by URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that specify the particular machine and pathname by which a file can be accessed, and transmitted from server to end user under HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). Codes, called tags, embedded in an HTML document associate particular words and images in the document with URLs so that a user can access another file, which may be halfway around the world, at the press of a key or the click of a mouse. These files may contain text (in a variety of fonts and styles), graphics images, movie files, and sounds as well as Java applets, ActiveX controls, or other small embedded software programs that execute when the user activates them by clicking a link. A user visiting a Web page also may be able to download files from an FTP site and send messages to other users via e-mail by using links on the Web page. The World Wide Web was developed by Timothy Berners-Lee in 1989 for the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, or Conseil Européen pour le Recherche Nucléaire, in French (CERN). Acronym: WWW. Also called: w 3 , W3, Web. See also ActiveX controls, HTML, HTTP, HTTP server (definition 2), Java applet, URL.
World-Wide Web. Hypertext system for publishing information over the Internet. World-Wide Web documents are text files coded using HTML so that they can include text, graphics, and sound, together with hyperlinks to other Web documents. Web documents can be viewed using a browser, such as Mosaic. The ease of use of the Web has led to a rapid expansion of the Internet; the Web was estimated 1994 to be growing at the rate of 1% per day.
A collection of internet sites that offer text and graphics and sound and animation resources through the hypertext transfer protocol;