Web is short for the "World Wide Web". You will find that a sizable number of people will make the mistake of thinking that the Web and Internet are the same thing. The Web is just a part of the Internet and should not be used to refer to anything which is outside of the World Wide Web.

The Web was invented by Sir Tim Berners-Lee whilst he was working at CERN. The universal standards of the Web are overseen by the World Wide Web Consortium. The genius of Berners-Lee idea was to marry a Hypertext language (HTML) to the infrastructure of the Internet. The Web was designed to give all users equal access, with no center, and a technological 'leveling' of hierarchy. Authority became horizontal, whereas, before the Web, all networks were vertical with a strong power structure. Berners-Lee has not profited from the Web, it's open source and free for access. The ideal of Berners-Lee was sharing.

The Web was proposed in 1989, and with help from Robert Cailliau, became a formal project by 1990. The structure of the Web was threefold,

• Hypertext documents
• Accessed by browsers
• Which used client-server architecture
  

The first server on the Web was a 'NeXT' computer, and Berners-Lee was responsible for designing the first browser, unsurprisingly called the 'WorldWideWeb'. Commerce was banned from the Web until 1994.

As has already been started, the key to the Web was the marrying of Hypertext to the Internet's infrastructure. Berners-Lee did this by inventing a set of universal unique identifiers (address),

• firstly named, Universal Document Identifier (UDI)
• latterly named, Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)
  

The document hosted at the above addresses were published with the language,

• HyperText Markup Language (HTML)

And the documents were accessed using,

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

The advantage of Berners-Lee system, in comparison to previous hypertext systems, was that documents could be linked to without any action from the author. The first graphical web browser to marry the above standards invented by Berners-Lee was the Mosaic web browser in 1993.