The World Wide Web (or WWW for short) was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, a British software consultant who was looking for a way to track associations between pieces of information using a computer (much like a thesaurus does manually). His initial program for doing this was called ‘Enquire’, developed in the 1980s.

He subsequently developed the idea, and the standards, to allow the sharing of data across the Internet. He created HTML as the standard method for coding web content. He designed an addressing scheme (contained in the URL) for locating web content. And he created HTTP as the protocol for transferring web content across the Internet.

The World Wide Web as we now know it appeared in 1991 and has grown exponentially since. Tim Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium [the W3C], the body that sets WWW standards. The W3C defines the World Wide Web as ‘the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge’.