The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet.^[1] It has also commonly become known simply as the Web. Individual document pages on the World Wide Web are called web pages and are accessed with a software application running on the user's computer, commonly called a web browser. Web pages may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia components, as well as web navigation features consisting ofhyperlinks.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist and former CERN employee,^[2] is the inventor of the Web. On 12 March 1989,^[3] Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.^[4] The 1989 proposal was meant for a more effective CERN communication system but Berners-Lee eventually realised the concept could be implemented throughout the world.^[5] Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will",^[6] and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December of that year.^[7] The first test was completed around 20 December 1990 and Berners-Lee reported about the project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext on 7 August 1991.^[8]