The Web allows us to communicate in a rich way, by displaying text, full color graphics, photos, sounds and even video. The Web began in 1992 at CERN , the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, as a means of distributing and annotating scientific research. Technical standards are now defined by the World-Wide Web Consortium . Web documents are ordinary text files that can be created with any word processing program. They include tags that control their appearance.
Tags can also define a word or phrase as a link .
Simple and reliable, HTTP is often a more cost-effective solution than traditional paper publishing. A URL is the Internet address for a web document or other file. Later in this tutorial, URLs are discussed in more detail. The web grew tremendously in popularity after the release of a free browser program, Mosaic , by the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications . When Mosaic was released in the spring of 1993, there were about 130 web sites on the Internet.