The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.


Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems like ENQUIRE, British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, 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" and they publicly introduced the project in December.
In the June 1970 issue of Popular Science magazine Arthur C. Clarke was reported to have predicted that satellites would one day "bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips" using a console that would combine the functionality of the Xerox, telephone, television and a small computer, allowing data transfer and video conferencing around the globe. In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that referenced ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980 and described a more elaborate information management system.


With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal on November 12 1990 to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture. This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him has become available." While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS.


The proposal was modeled after the Dynatext SGML reader by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was technically advanced and was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within HIGH Time but it was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration.The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the Web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessed by web browsers from web servers. In short, the Web can be thought of as an application "running" on the Internet.