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World Wide Web

History

The World Wide Web (or just The Web) is the collection of all hypertext documents on the Internet: A simplified carry-through of various schemes based on hypertext that have been proposed since Vannevar Bush's seminal article, As We May Think, in 1945.

The Web was created in 1990 by Tim Bernes-Lee at CERN; and became wildly popular in 1993 due to two events:

1. CERN released the Web protocol HTTP and tag language HTML as free-as-in-speech software; and
2. The NCSA released Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, which allowed the viewing of images in-page as well as setting the standards for the presentation of both text and linkage on Web pages.

These two events turned the Web into the killer application of the Internet, supplanting all other means of retrieving information on the Internet.

Web Servers

There are half a dozen programs, called Web servers, that use the hypertext protocol to run a Web site and relay its pages to Web browsers that request them. The most commonly used Web servers are Apache and Microsoft's Internet Information Service (IIS).

Apache

Apache, descended from the original NCSA HTTPd daemon, is the most popular — half of all sites and most non-commercial sites run it — and the most stable, especially on U◊◊◊◊/Linux systems. It comes with most Linux distributions, including Fedora. Apache is maintained in several versions: 1.3.x, 2.0.x and 2.2.x.

PHP

PHP is a scripting language made to process Web forms, to access database back-ends for Web sites, and to generate Web pages on the fly. It was created in 1995 by Rasmus Lerdorf. Its original parser (processing engine) was rewritten as the Zend engine in 1997 by the Israeli team of Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski. PHP works with both Windows (Apache, IIS) and U◊◊◊◊/Linux (Apache) systems. The current version of PHP is 5.x, of which two major revisions are maintained: 5.2.x and 5.3.x.