WorldWideWeb

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WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) is the first web browser<ref name="faq-www">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and web page editor.<ref name="IEEE" /> It was discontinued in 1994. It was the first WYSIWYG HTML editor.

The source code was released into the public domain on 30 April 1993.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="faq" />

History

Tim Berners-Lee wrote what would become known as WorldWideWeb on a NeXT Computer<ref name="faq"> {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> during the second half of 1990, while working for CERN, a European nuclear research agency. The first edition was completed "some time before" 25 December 1990, according to Berners-Lee, after two months of development.<ref name="timblhistory">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The browser was announced on the newsgroups and became available to the general public in August 1991.<ref name="timblhistory"/><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff,<ref name="upgrade">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and visiting undergraduate student Nicola Pellow – who later wrote the Line Mode Browser – were involved in the project.<ref name="timblhistory" />

Berners-Lee considered different names for his new application, including The Mine of Information and The Information Mesh, before publicly launching the WorldWideWeb browser in 1991.<ref name="cern">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> When a new version was released in 1994, it was renamed Nexus Browser, in order to differentiate between the software (WorldWideWeb) and the World Wide Web.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

The team created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems. Porting to the X Window System was not possible as nobody on the team had experience with the X Window System.<ref name="IEEE"/>

Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into a C programming language version, creating the libwww API.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

A number of early browsers appeared, notably ViolaWWW. They were all eclipsed 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, and various communication protocols).Template:Cn

On 30 April 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain. Several versions of the software are still available on the web in various states.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Berners-Lee initially considered releasing it under the GNU General Public License, but after hearing rumors that companies might balk at the concept if any licensing issues were involved, he eventually opted to release it into the public domain.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2021, Sotheby's held an auction for an NFT of the WorldWideWeb source code.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Features

Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for the NeXTSTEP platform, the program uses many of NeXTSTEP's components – WorldWideWeb's layout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Text class.<ref name="faq-www"/>

WorldWideWeb is capable of displaying basic style sheets,<ref name="faq"/> downloading and opening any file type with a MIME type that is also supported by the NeXT system (PostScript,<ref name="IEEE">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref name="faq"/> movies, and sounds<ref name="faq"/>), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. In earlier versions, images are displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class gained support for Image objects.<ref name="faq"/> WorldWideWeb is able to use different protocols: FTP, HTTP, NNTP, and local files. Later versions are able to display inline images.<ref name="faq-www"/>

The browser is also a WYSIWYG editor.<ref name="faq-www"/><ref name="IEEE"/> It allows the simultaneous editing and linking of many pages in different windows. The functions "Mark Selection", which creates an anchor, and "Link to Marked", which makes the selected text an anchor linking to the last marked anchor, allow the creation of links. Editing pages remotely is not possible, as the HTTP PUT method had not yet been implemented during the period of the application's active development.<ref name="faq-www"/> Files can be edited in a local file system which is in turn served onto the Web by an HTTP server.Template:Cn

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contains Next and Previous buttons that automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, similar to Opera's Rewind and Fast Forward buttons, or HyperCard; 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.<ref name="faq-www"/> This is useful for web pages which contain lists of links. Many still do, but the user interface link-chaining was not adopted by other contemporary browser writers, and it only gained popularity later. An equivalent functionality is nowadays provided by connecting web pages with explicit navigation buttons repeated on each webpage among those links, or with typed links in the headers of the page. This places more of a burden on web site designers and developers, but allows them to control the presentation of the navigation links.Template:Cn

WorldWideWeb does not have bookmarks as they exist in later browsers, but a similar feature was provided: to save a link for later use, users could link to it from their own home page (start page). Users could create multiple home pages, similar to folders in modern web browsers' bookmarks.<ref name="IEEE"/>

See also

• History of the World Wide Web
• Wiki

External links

• Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb
• A Little History of the World Wide Web
• Berners-Lee's blog
• Weaving the Web (Template:ISBN), Berners-Lee's book about the conception of the Web.
• CERN, Where the Web Was "WWW" born