World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a system for sharing pages of information across the internet. People often call it "the Web" for short. It is the part of the internet you use when you open a browser like Chrome, Safari, or Firefox and visit a website. The Web has billions of pages, and they are all linked together by clickable links.

Many people mix up the Web and the internet, but they are not the same thing. The internet is the giant network of connected computers around the world. The Web is one of the things that runs on top of that network, like a road system runs on top of land. Email, video calls, and online games also use the internet, but they are not part of the Web.

The Web was invented in 1989 by a British scientist named Tim Berners-Lee. He worked at a science lab in Switzerland called CERN. Scientists there had trouble sharing research with each other, so Berners-Lee built a way to link documents on different computers. He wrote the first web browser, the first web server, and the first website. He launched the Web for everyone in 1991. He gave it away for free instead of trying to get rich from it.

The Web works through three main inventions. The first is HTML, a code that tells a browser how to show a page. The second is a web address, like medialab.org, which points to a specific page. The third is the link, a piece of text or a button you can click to jump to another page. These three pieces let any page connect to any other page anywhere in the world.

The Web grew faster than almost anything in human history. In 1993 there were about 130 websites. Ten years later there were more than 40 million. Today there are over 1 billion. That is more websites than there are people in North and South America combined.

The Web has also raised hard questions. Who decides what stays online and what gets taken down? How do we tell true information from fake? Can the Web be made safer for kids? Tim Berners-Lee, now in his seventies, still works on these problems. He often says the Web he built is not finished, and that the next version is up to the people who use it.