CERN announces World Wide Web protocols will be free.
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is the world's dominant software platform. It is an information space where documents and other web resources can be accessed through the Internet using a web browser. The Web has changed people's lives immeasurably. It is the primary tool billions of people worldwide use to interact on the Internet.Web resources may be any type of downloadable media. Web pages are documents interconnected by hypertext links formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The HTML syntax displays embedded hyperlinks with URLs, which permits users to navigate to other web resources. In addition to text, web pages may contain references to images, video, audio, and software components, which are either displayed or internally executed in the user's web browser to render pages or streams of multimedia content. Web applications are web pages that function as application software.
Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website. Websites are stored in computers that are running a web server, which is a program that responds to requests made over the Internet from web browsers running on a user's computer. Website content can be provided by a publisher or interactively from user-generated content. Websites are provided for a myriad of informative, entertainment, commercial, and governmental reasons.
The Web was originally conceived as a document management system. The information in the Web is transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to be accessed by users through software applications.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), known as CERN (; French pronunciation: [sɛʁn]; derived from the name Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire), is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states. Israel is the only non-European country granted full membership. CERN is an official United Nations Observer.The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2019 had 2,660 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. In 2016 CERN generated 49 petabytes of data.CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research – as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations. CERN is the site of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. The main site at Meyrin hosts a large computing facility, which is primarily used to store and analyse data from experiments, as well as simulate events. Researchers need remote access to these facilities, so the lab has historically been a major wide area network hub. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.