Note: This talk is an old one from 1991 and 1992. Some parts may have been altered later but in general it is out of date, though interesting for historical reasons. Much of the "What is W3" section is of course still just as valid.

WorldWide Web Seminar

Tim Berners-Lee CERN
Welcome to this online seminar on the World-Wide Web (W3). It gives first an overview of W3 for those to whom it is new, including a review of the current status of software, and then mentions some plans for the future.

This is the text track. You might also want to see:

What is W3?

W3 is a "distributed heterogeneous collaborative multimedia information system". If you don't know what that means now, you will be the end of the talk, even though we won't use such vocabulary (promise).

W3 is many things: (go through them in order)

The future

So much for the web as it is. Everything we have seen so far is information distributed by server managers to clients everywhere. A next step is the move to universal authorship, in which everyone involved in an area can contribute to the electronic representation of the group knowledge.

Here are some details of the technical plans for the future

Getting Started

Everything we know about W3 is available on the web itself. If you can't find it, either we haven't had time to write it, or we don't know it either, or you just haven't found it. When you get home, pick up the latest WWW client for you system, install it, and use it to answer your questions.

We hope you have found this talk useful. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please mail them to me . Thank you for your time.

© 1991-3 Tim BL