| WorldWideWeb | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer | Tim Berners-Lee forCERN |
| Initial release | 25 December 1990; 34 years ago (1990-12-25)[1] |
| Final release | 0.17  / 1994; 31 years ago (1994) |
| Repository | |
| Written in | Objective-C[1] |
| Operating system | NeXTSTEP[1] |
| Available in | English |
| Type | Web browser, Webauthoring tool |
| License | Public-domain software |
| Website | w3 |
WorldWideWeb (later renamedNexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) is the firstweb browser[1] andweb page editor.[2] It was discontinued in 1994. It was the firstWYSIWYGHTML editor.
Thesource code was released into thepublic domain on 30 April 1993.[3][4]
Tim Berners-Lee wrote what would become known as WorldWideWeb on aNeXT Computer[4] during the second half of 1990, while working forCERN, a European nuclear research agency. The first edition was completed "some time before" 25 December 1990, according to Berners-Lee, after two months of development.[5] The browser was announced on thenewsgroups and became available to the general public in August 1991.[5][6] By this time, several others, including Bernd Pollermann,Robert Cailliau,Jean-François Groff,[7] and visiting undergraduate studentNicola Pellow – who later wrote theLine Mode Browser – were involved in the project.[5]
Berners-Lee considered different names for his new application, includingThe Mine of Information andThe Information Mesh, before publicly launching theWorldWideWeb browser in 1991.[8] When a new version was released in 1994, it was renamedNexus Browser, in order to differentiate between the software (WorldWideWeb) and theWorld Wide Web.[9]
The team created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard toport this feature from the NeXT system to otheroperating systems. Porting to theX Window System was not possible as nobody on the team had experience with the X Window System.[2]
Berners-Lee and Groff later adapted many of WorldWideWeb's components into aC programming language version, creating thelibwwwAPI.[10]
On 30 April 1993, the CERN directorate released the source code of WorldWideWeb into thepublic domain. Several versions of the software are still available on the web in various states.[11] Berners-Lee initially considered releasing it under theGNU General Public License, but after hearing rumors that companies might balk at the concept if any licensing issues were involved, he eventually opted to release it into thepublic domain.[12] In 2021,Sotheby's held an auction for anNFT of the WorldWideWebsource code.[13][14]
Since WorldWideWeb was developed on and for theNeXTSTEP platform, the program uses many of NeXTSTEP's components – WorldWideWeb'slayout engine was built around NeXTSTEP's Textclass.[1]
WorldWideWeb is capable of displaying basicstyle sheets,[4] downloading and opening any file type with a MIME type that is also supported by the NeXT system (PostScript,[2][4] movies, and sounds[4]), browsingnewsgroups, andspellchecking. In earlier versions, images are displayed in separate windows, until NeXTSTEP's Text class gained support for Image objects.[4] WorldWideWeb is able to use different protocols:FTP,HTTP,NNTP, andlocal files. Later versions are able to display inline images.[1]
The browser is also aWYSIWYG editor.[1][2] It allows the simultaneous editing and linking of many pages in different windows. The functions "Mark Selection", which creates an anchor, and "Link to Marked", which makes the selected text an anchor linking to the last marked anchor, allow the creation of links. Editing pages remotely is not possible, as theHTTP PUTmethod had not yet been implemented during the period of the application's active development.[1]
WorldWideWeb's navigation panel contains Next and Previous buttons that automatically navigate to the next or previous link on the last page visited, similar toOpera's Rewind and Fast Forward buttons, orHyperCard; 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.[1]
WorldWideWeb does not havebookmarks as they exist in later browsers, but a similar feature was provided: to save a link for later use, users could link to it from their own home page (start page). Users could create multiple home pages, similar to folders in modern web browsers' bookmarks.[2]
