world wide web (www)

The World Wide Web (WWW), often known as WWW, W3, or the Web, is the most widely used software platform on the globe. Tim Berners-Lee proposed the architecture of what became the World Wide Web. It is an information-based environment where users may access documents and other resources through the Internet using a web browser, allowing users to search for information by going from one page to the next. The Internet has had a huge impact on people's lives, and it is the major means of communication for billions of people throughout the world. The Web has three constituent elements: 

  • HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, managing the data exchanging between the server and the client.
  • URL: Uniform Resource Locator, the address of a website on the Internet.
  • HTML: Hypertext Markup Language, the most common format for publishing web documents.

A website is made up of several web resources having a common topic and, in most cases, a shared domain name. A publisher can give website content, or it can be developed interactively from user-generated content.

[Last updated in May of 2022 by the Wex Definitions Team]