The web is not the internet
People often use the two words as if they meant the same thing. They do not. The internet is the underlying network that moves data between computers. The World Wide Web is a service that runs on top of it: a system of documents and resources that can be reached with a browser and connected by links. Email, online games and many messaging apps use the internet without being part of the web.
The distinction matters for history. The internet existed for roughly two decades before the web did, and the web’s success is a large part of why the network reached so many people.
A proposal at CERN
The web began at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva. In March 1989, a software engineer there named Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for managing information. CERN had thousands of researchers, many of them visiting from other institutions, using different computers and keeping documents in different places. Finding a document, or even knowing it existed, was hard.
His idea was to connect documents with hypertext links, so that a reader could jump from one piece of information to another across different machines. A colleague, Robert Cailliau, joined the effort and helped promote it. Berners-Lee’s manager is often quoted as describing the first proposal as “vague but exciting”, though it is best to treat that quote as a well-known anecdote rather than a documented record.
The three core pieces
By around 1990 and 1991, Berners-Lee had designed the basic technologies that the web still relies on:
- URL, an address for a resource, such as a page.
- HTTP, the set of rules a browser and a server use to request and send resources.
- HTML, a markup language for writing pages and marking where links go.
He also wrote the first browser and editor, called WorldWideWeb, on a NeXT computer, and the first web server. The first website described the project itself, and it was hosted at CERN. Access beyond the laboratory began in 1991, and the web gradually moved into academic use.
A key decision came in April 1993, when CERN made the underlying web software available for anyone to use without paying fees. Open, royalty-free technology removed a barrier that might have slowed adoption.
Browsers bring in the public
Early browsers were mostly text-based or limited to certain computers. Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the US and released in 1993, changed that. It displayed images inline with text, ran on common computers and was easy to install. Marc Andreessen was among its developers, and he went on to help found Netscape, whose Navigator browser launched in 1994 and became widely used.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, to guide the development of web standards. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer arrived in 1995 and competed fiercely with Netscape in what became known as the browser wars. Competition sped up new features, but it also produced incompatible behavior between browsers, which web designers had to work around for years.
Search and scripts
As the number of pages grew, finding them became the main challenge. Early directories listed sites by category, and search engines followed. Google, founded in 1998, gained attention for ranking pages partly on how many other pages linked to them. That approach turned the web’s links into a signal of what was useful, and it is a good example of an early design idea paying off in a new way.
Pages also became more interactive. JavaScript, created in 1995 at Netscape, let pages respond to a visitor without reloading. Style sheets separated how a page looks from what it says. Over time, pages gained forms, animation and the ability to update parts of themselves, which made web-based email and maps practical.
From pages to platforms
In the 2000s, the web shifted from documents that people mostly read to services that people use and contribute to. Blogs, wikis, video sharing and social media all grew from this phase. Online shopping moved onto the web as payment systems matured, and companies built tools that ran in the browser, an approach that underlies cloud computing and web-based office software.
The web also had to adapt to mobile devices. Pages designed for large monitors were awkward on early phones, so techniques that adjust a layout to the screen size became standard. Many services now offer both a website and an app, sometimes built on shared web technologies.
Security and the open web
Early web traffic was mostly unencrypted. Over time, browsers and websites moved toward encrypted connections, shown by a padlock or similar indicator, and browsers added warnings for unsafe pages. Concerns about tracking cookies, data collection and misleading content have shaped later changes in browsers and in law.
At the same time, a few large companies now host or influence a great deal of web traffic, which has raised debate about whether the web is as open as it was designed to be. Berners-Lee himself has publicly raised concerns about this over the years, and the discussion is ongoing.
What the web changed
The web did not invent networks or email, but it made the internet understandable. A link, an address and a browser window were things a person could learn in minutes. That simplicity, together with an open and free technical foundation, is the main reason a lab’s document-sharing idea became part of daily life.