The World-Wide Web (W 3 ) initiative is a practical project to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This article describes the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the "web", and compares them with various contemporary systems. The Dream Pick up your pen, mouse or favorite pointing device and press it on a reference in this document - perhaps to the author's name, or organization, or some related work. Suppose you are directly presented with the background material - other papers, the author's coordinates, the organization's address and its entire telephone directory. Suppose each of these documents has the same property of being linked to other original documents all over the world. You would have at your fingertips all you need to know about electronic publishing, high-energy physics or for that matter Asian culture. If you are reading this article on paper, you can only dream, but read on. Since Vannevar Bush's article [1],...

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The World-Wide Web (W 3 ) initiative encourages physicists to share information using wide-area networks. The W 3 software provides easy hypertext navigation and information retrieval in a consistent manner to a vast store of existing data and future hypertext. The client-server architecture uses global conventions for document identifiers, a set of common access protocols, and an ever-widening set of transfer formats. The HTTP protocol is introduced which allows servers, sometimes simple shell scripts, to provide data and take advantage of a range of hypertext browsers on many platforms. Existing data may be put on the "web" by a gateway without affecting data management procedures. Internet archives, news, "WAIS" and "Gopher" systems are already included in the web. The future will see multiple data formats being handled by negotiation between client and server, and hypertext editors bringing collaborative authorship in the information universe. The need In few disciplines is th...

Many protocols and systems for document search and retrieval are currently in use, and many more protocols or refinements of existing protocols are to be expected in a field whose expansion is explosive. These systems are aiming to achieve global search and readership of documents across differing computing platforms, and despite a plethora of protocols and data formats. As protocols evolve, gateways can allow global access to remain possible. As data formats evolve, format conversion programs can preserve global access. There is one area, however, in which it is impractical to make conversions, and that is in the names used to identify documents. This is because names of documents are passed on in so many ways, from the backs of envelopes to hypertext documents, and may have a long life. This paper discusses the requirements on a universal naming syntax which can be used to refer to documents available using existing protocols, and may be extended with technology. It makes a recommend...

The World-Wide Web (W 3 ) initiative is a practical project to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This article describes the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the "web", and compares them with various contemporary systems. The Dream Pick up your pen, mouse or favorite pointing device and press it on a reference in this document - perhaps to the author's name, or organization, or some related work. Suppose you are directly presented with the background material - other papers, the author's coordinates, the organization's address and its entire telephone directory. Suppose each of these documents has the same property of being linked to other original documents all over the world. You would have at your fingertips all you need to know about electronic publishing, high-energy physics or for that matter Asian culture. If you are reading this article on paper, you can only dream, but read on. Since Vannevar Bush's article [1],...