WorldWideWeb

This article is about the first web browser. For the distributed hypertext system, see World Wide Web.

WorldWideWeb

File:WorldWideWeb screenshot.gif WorldWideWeb, c.1993
Developer(s)	Tim Berners-Lee for CERN
Initial release	December 23, 1990 (1990-12-23)
Repository	www.w3.org/History/1991-WWW-NeXT/Implementation/
Written in	Objective-C
Operating system	NeXTSTEP
Available in	English
Type	Web browser, web authoring tool
License	Public domain
Website	www.w3.org/.../WorldWideWeb.html

WorldWideWeb, later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion about the software and the World Wide Web, was the first web browser and editor. When it was written, WorldWideWeb was the only way to view the Web.

The source code was released into the public domain in 1993. Some of the code still resides on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXTcube in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer's status as a historical artifact.

History

Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb on a NeXT Computer during the second half of 1990, while working for CERN. The first successful build was completed on December 25, 1990, after only two months of development. 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.

The team created so called "passive browsers" which don't have the editing prospects because it was hard to port the ability editing pages like on the NeXT system to other operating systems. The port to the X Window System (X) wasn't possible as nobody on the team had experience with X.

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 eclipsed 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, etc.

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 maximize corporate support.

Technical information

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.

Features

File:WorldWideWeb FSF GNU.png

Many of WorldWideWeb's features.

WorldWideWeb was capable of displaying basic style sheets, downloading and opening any file type supported by the NeXT system (PostScript, movies and sounds), browsing newsgroups, and spellchecking. At first, images were displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class supported Image objects.

The browser was also an WYSIWYG editor. It allowed the simultaneous editing and linking of many pages in different windows. The functions "Mark Selection", which created an anchor, and "Link to Marked", which made the selected text an anchor linking to the last marked anchor, allowed the creation of links. Editing pages remotely was not yet possible, as the HTTP PUT method had not yet been implemented. Files would be edited in a local file system which was in turn served onto the Web by an HTTP server.

WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contained Next and Previous buttons that would automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, similar to Opera's Rewind and Fast Forward buttons; 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 useful for web pages which contained lists of links. Many still do, but the user interface link-chaining was not adopted by other browser writers, and it disappeared until it was later picked up by later web browsers. An equivalent functionality is nowadays provided by connecting web pages with explicit navigation buttons repeated on each webpage among those links, or with typed links in the headers of the page. This places more of a burden on web site designers and developers, but allows them to control the presentation of the navigation links.

WorldWideWeb didn't have features like bookmarks, but a similar feature was presented in the browser: if a link should be saved for later use linking it to you're own home page (start page) and the link was remembered like bookmarks. The ability to create more home pages were implemented, similar to folders in the actual web browsers bookmarks.

Later versions were also able to display inline images.

WorldWideWeb was able to use different protocols: FTP, HTTP, NNTP, and local files

Naming

Berners-Lee proposed different names for his new application: The Mine of Information and The Information Mesh were proposals. At the end WorldWideWeb was chosen, but later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion between the World Wide Web and the web browser.

See also

• History of the World Wide Web

External links

• Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb
• A Little History of the World Wide Web
• Berners-Lee's blog
• Weaving the Web (ISBN 0-06-251587-X), Berners-Lee's book about the conception of the Web
• Nexus binaries and source
• CERN, Where the Web Was "WWW" born