The WWW project was created by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, as a wide area hypermedia information retrieval initiative. To date the only hypermedia browser for these HTTP servers, which form the basic WWW, is Mosaic. The idea behind global hypermedia is that information located around the world is interconnected in an environment that allows you to travel through the information by clicking on hyperlinks. Hyperlinks can be terms, icons, or images in documents that point to other, related documents or services.
Any hyperlink can point to any document or service anywhere on the Internet.
The plain text, formatted text, and text with graphics documents can be handled from within the Mosaic application. This keeps the size and complexity of Mosaic down considerably because it doesn't have to worry about displaying movies or playing sounds. Mosaic hyperlinks can also generate telnet and ftp sessions, connect to Gopher and Archie servers, send e-mail, etc. Mosaic binaries and supported external viewers for workstations, PCUs, and Macs can be found by ftping to ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu. Mosaic has opened up the vast amounts of information on the Internet to the average user.