World-Wide Web: a distributed hypermedia paradigm for global networking
Francis Heylighen · VUBIR (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) · 1994
The World-Wide Web (WWW) provides a unified client image to an enormous range and variety of information services on the Internet. WWW use presently undergoes a spectacular growth and seems set to surpass that of all other Internet services. WWW combines extreme power with maximal simplicity and ease of use through its metaphor of distributed hypermedia. A WWW document provides formatted text with possibilities of embedded graphics, sound, animation, and hyperlinks. The hyperlinks when selected provide automatic access to other WWW-documents, files or services (FTP, Gopher, News, Telnet, WAIS, Email...) available anywhere on the Internet. This paper reviews some of the freely available WWW software: browsers, servers, and editors. An elementary introduction is given to the underlying protocols: HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) for the formatting of hyperdocuments, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) for the communication between WWW browsers and servers, and URL (Uniform Resource Locators) as a universal addressing scheme for Internet files and services.