The World Wide Web

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The World Wide Web

To anyone born in the 90s or later, the World Wide Web (WWW or Web) has been a part of their life forever. They could not imagine a world without it; although, only a year before the 90s started, did the WWW come into existence. People had been living without the use of the WWW since before 1989, and everyone born after 1989 has grown up with the use of the WWW. The WWW has changed the way society works in a variety of ways. Not long ago was written letters the way of communication, which could take up to a week to respond, but with the help of the WWW, anyone can send an email with a response coming back in as little as a couple of hours. This is just one of the various ways the WWW has affected the United States.

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW, which was about 20 years after the first connection was established over what today is called the Internet. Back in 1989, Berners-Lee was a software engineer at CERN, the largest particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland (WWW Foundation 1). Berners-Lee had proposed a set of technologies that could make the Internet available and useful to many people. However, at first, Berners-Lee’s proposal was not accepted, but he would not go down without a fight. He persevered and by October of 1990, he had laid out the three essential technologies that are still the foundation of today’s Web: 1. HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. It is the publishing format for the Web. It has the ability to format documents and link to other documents and resources. 2. URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. It is an address that is special to each resource on the Web. 3. HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It allows for the retrieval of linked resources across the Web (1). After...

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...s in its 20+ years that it has been around.

Works Cited

1. Antliff, Alex. "10 Ways The Internet Has Changed The World." WhatCulture! WhatCulture, 10 July 2013. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

2. Boswell, Wendy. "How The World Wide Web Has Changed Society." About.com Web Search. About.com, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

3. Dougherty, Terri. Freedom of Expression and the Internet. Detroit, MI: Lucent, 2010. Print.

4. "History of the Web." World Wide Web Foundation. World Wide Web Foundation, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

5. "North America Internet Usage Statistics, Population and Telecommunications Reports." North America Internet Usage Statistics, Population and Telecommunications Reports. Internet World Stats, 30 June 2012. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

6. "The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future." The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future. W3, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.

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