20 little-known facts about WWW

BANGALORE, INDIA: It is nothing less than breathtaking to note that the World Wide Web (WWW) has grown at a frenetic pace over the past 20 years of its existence.

After it was launched in August 1991, although it was first conceived in 1989, the applications of the Web have been almost doubling every passing year. The Web impacts most of us in a way that not many other applications can ever do.

At its 20th year, here are some little-known facts about the World Wide Web and its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee:

1. The birth name of the founder of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee is Timothy John Berners-Lee

2. A Britisher, Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, UK and later, went on to work at the University of Southampton

3. Tim Berners-Lee was a physicist and also a computer scientist working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland

4. Contrary to popular perception, he didn't link all the computers with an Internet connection from across the world

5. Tim Berners-Lee is credited for evolving three technologies — uniform resource locators (URLs), HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) — that brought WWW alive

6. Robert Cailliau, a Belgian informatics engineer and computer scientist, collaborated with Berners-Lee in developing the WWW

7. Cailliau, and not Berners-Lee, was the first surfer of the Web

8. According to Berners-Lee, the WWW project was started to allow (only) high energy physicists at CERN to share data, news, and documentation and it was subsequently decided to extend it to other general users

9. He used a NeXT system by Steve jobs to write the programme code

10. World Wide Web was finalized as the name of the project, after it was preferred over Information Mesh, Mine of Information and Information Mine

11. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever website and web server and the first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

12. The first-ever Web page was just about the information on the World Wide Web project

13. The World Wide Web and the Internet are not the same, but related. While the Internet is a networking infrastructure involving a lot of smaller networks, the World Wide Web is a tool to access from and share information on it

14. The use of 'www' as a subdomain name is not required by any technical or policy standard. In fact, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch

15. Considered in popular terms as the Web and WWW, the World Wide Web is also known as W3

16. According to worldwidewebsize.com, the Web contains about 19.68 billion pages — more than three times the world's population

17. Across the globe, the number of Web users is over two billion, and India alone has more than 100 million users

18. The first website on the .xxx domain (meant for adult websites) went online only this year, though a major portion of the Web is crowded by porn sites

19. In the mid-90s, Microsoft founder Bill Gates reportedly remarked in an interview that an Internet browser was a trivial piece of software. Later, he would launch Internet Explorer

20. On the abbreviation WWW, English writer Douglas Adams once wrote in The Independent on Sunday, "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for".