WorldWideWeb

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WorldWideWeb
Image:WorldWideWeb.png

WorldWideWeb, c.1993
Maintainer: Tim Berners-Lee for CERN
Stable release: 0.18  (1994 ?) [+/-]
Preview release: none  (n/a) [+/-]
OS: NeXTSTEP
Use: Web browser
License: Public domain
Website: www.w3.org/.../WorldWideWeb.html

WorldWideWeb was the world's first web browser and WYSIWYG HTML editor. It was introduced on February 26, 1991, by Tim Berners-Lee, and ran on the NeXTSTEP platform. It was later renamed Nexus to avoid confusion with the World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb (WWW) was the first program which used not only the common File Transfer Protocol but also the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, invented by Berners-Lee in 1989. At the time it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

The source code was released into the public domain in 1993, thus making it free software.

Contents

A NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb during the second half of 1990 while working for CERN. The first successful build was completed on Christmas Day, 1990, and successive builds circulated among Berners-Lee's colleagues at CERN before being released to the public (by way of Internet newsgroups) in August 1991. By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann, Robert Cailliau, Jean-François Groff, and graduate student Nicola Pellow (who wrote the line-mode browser), were involved in the project.

Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into a C programming language version, creating the libwww API.

A number of early browsers appeared, notably ViolaWWW. They were all replaced 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, various communication protocols, and so on.

On April 30, 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into the public domain, making it free software. Several versions of the software are still available to download from evolt.org's browser archive. Berners-Lee initially considered releasing it under the GNU General Public License, but eventually opted for public domain to maximise corporate support.[1]

Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for the NeXTSTEP platform, the program used many of NeXTSTEP's components—WorldWideWeb's layout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Text class.

WorldWideWeb was capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading and opening any file type supported by the NeXT system (which included PostScript, movies, sounds, and so on), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. At first, images were displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class supported Image objects. Editing pages remotely was not yet possible, as the HTTP PUT method had not yet been implemented. In fact, editing pages remotely would have been possible (and still is) with the GET method by instructing the receiving end (usually a CGI program module) to store the parameters it received. However, at that time this technique was unknown.

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contained Next and Previous buttons that would automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, 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. This was initially useful because most sites were headed by such a table of links; however, as the World Wide Web grew, the convention was dropped, as were these buttons from later web browsers.

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  1. ^ History of Libwww.
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