The credit for the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW) goes to Tim Berners-Lee (later given the title of Sir) and his colleagues at CERN (Eurropean Council for Nuclear Research), an international scientific establishment based in Switzerland. They developed HTML (hyper text markup language), the format that directs a computer how to display a web page, HTTP (hyper text markup language), the format that directs a computer how to display a web page, HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) that facilitates communication between clients and servers and URLs (universal resource locators) that identify resources like documents, images, dowloadable files, services and electronic mailboxes on the Web thereby reducing a range of complex instructions to a single mouse click.
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The World Wide Web provides the facility for all the world's computers to be linked, making it easy to send documentation electronically via the Internet. Mr. Lee deliberately refrained from patenting his work on HTTP, HTML and URLs because he wanted to encourage as many people as possible to use the Web. The forerunner of the Internet, however, was the ARPANET. ARPA stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the US Defence Department that possessed linked computers across North America to enable exchange of information.
