WorldWideWeb

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This article is about the first web browser. For the distributed hypertext system, see World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb was the world's first web browser and WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) HTML editor. It was introduced on February 26, 1991, by Tim Berners-Lee, and ran on the NeXTSTEP platform. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

Contents

1 History
2 Technical information

2.1 Features

2.1.1 Trivia

3 See also
4 External links

History

A NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb during the second half of 1990 while working for CERN. The first successful build was completed on Christmas Day, 1990, and successive builds circulated among Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN before being released to the public (by way of Internet newsgroups) in August 1991. By this time several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, and graduate student Nicola Pellow (who wrote the line-mode browser) were involved in the project.

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

A number of early browsers appeared, notably ViolaWWW. They were all replaced 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, various communication protocols, and so on.

On April 30, 1993, the CERN directorate released WorldWideWeb into the public domain, and several versions of the software are still available to download from [evolt.org's browser archive].

Technical information

Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for the NeXTSTEP platform, the program used many of NeXTSTEP's components - WorldWideWeb's layout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Text class.

Features

WorldWideWeb was capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading and opening any file type supported by the NeXT system (which included PostScript, movies, sounds, and so on), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. At first, images were displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class supported Image objects. Editing pages remotely was not yet possible, as the HTTP PUT method had not yet been implemented.

Trivia

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contained Next and Previous buttons that would automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, 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. This was initially useful because most pages were headed by such a table of links; however, as the World Wide Web grew, the convention was dropped, as were these buttons from later web browsers.

External links

[Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb]
[A Little History of the World Wide Web]
[Berners-Lee's blog]
Weaving the Web (ISBN 006251587X), Berners-Lee's book about the conception of the Web
[World Wide Web downloadable here]