WorldWideWeb facts for kids
 |
|
| Developer(s) | Tim Berners-Lee for CERN |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 25 December 1990 |
| Last release |
0.17
 / 1994 |
| Written in | Objective-C |
| Operating system | NeXTSTEP |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Web browser, Web authoring tool |
| License | Public-domain software |
WorldWideWeb was the very first web browser and a special tool to create web pages. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web itself. This program was also the first WYSIWYG HTML editor. WYSIWYG stands for "What You See Is What You Get." This means you could see how your web page would look while you were building it. The program stopped being used in 1994.
The original instructions for the program, called its source code, were made free for everyone to use on April 30, 1993. Some of this original code is still on Tim Berners-Lee's old NeXT Computer. This computer is now in a CERN museum. It is kept as a historical item, so the code on it has not been moved. In 2013, a project started at CERN to save this old computer and software. This was to celebrate 20 years since the web was given to the world.
The Story of the First Web Browser
Tim Berners-Lee created the WorldWideWeb program. He built it on a NeXT Computer in 1990. At that time, he worked for CERN, a big research center in Europe. He finished the first version of the program around December 25, 1990. It took him about two months to build it.
The program was announced to the public in August 1991. Soon, other people joined the project. These included Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, and Nicola Pellow. Nicola Pellow later helped create another early web browser.
Berners-Lee thought of different names for his new program. Some ideas were "The Mine of Information" and "The Information Mesh." But he decided to call it "WorldWideWeb." In 1994, a new version was released. To make sure people knew the difference between the program and the internet, it was renamed "Nexus Browser."
The team also made simpler web browsers. These "passive browsers" could not edit web pages. It was hard to make the editing feature work on other computer systems. The NeXT system was very different from others.
Later, Berners-Lee and Groff used parts of WorldWideWeb's code. They used it to create a tool called libwww. This tool helped other programmers build web applications.
Other early browsers appeared, like ViolaWWW. But a browser called Mosaic became much more popular. By 1993, Mosaic had taken over from WorldWideWeb. The people who created WorldWideWeb moved on to other important tasks. They started setting up rules for how the World Wide Web should grow. This included creating HTML and other ways computers talk to each other.
On April 30, 1993, CERN made the WorldWideWeb program's code free for everyone. This meant anyone could use or change it. Berners-Lee wanted it to be free so that more people would use the web.
What Could It Do?
WorldWideWeb was made for the NeXTSTEP computer system. So, it used many of NeXTSTEP's built-in features. For example, it used NeXTSTEP's Text tools to show web pages.
The WorldWideWeb browser could do many things:
- It could show basic style sheets. These are like design rules for web pages.
- It could download and open different types of files. This included movies and sounds.
- It let users browse newsgroups, which were like online discussion forums.
- It had a spellcheck feature.
- At first, images opened in separate windows. Later, images could be seen right on the web page.
- It could use different ways to get information. These included FTP, HTTP, and NNTP. It could also open files saved on your computer.
This browser was also a WYSIWYG editor. This meant you could edit web pages and see the changes right away. You could also work on many pages at once in different windows. It was easy to create links between pages. You could "Mark Selection" to choose a spot. Then, you could "Link to Marked" to connect text to that spot. You could not edit pages on the internet directly. This was because the tools for that were not ready yet. But you could edit files on your computer. Then, you could put them on the web using a server.
WorldWideWeb had "Next" and "Previous" buttons. These buttons would take you to the next or previous link on the page you just visited. For example, if you clicked a link from a list, the "Previous" button would take you to the link before it in that list. This was helpful for pages with many links. Other browsers did not use this feature much at first. Today, websites often have their own "Next" or "Previous" buttons.
WorldWideWeb did not have bookmarks like modern browsers. But you could save links in a similar way. You could link to them from your own home page. You could even have many home pages, like folders for bookmarks today.
Images for kids
-
The original icon for the WorldWideWeb browser.
See also
In Spanish: WorldWideWeb para niños
