The World Wide Web (WWW or the Web) is the collective term given to all the documents and data residing on the Internet that can be accessed using a browser such as Netscape™ or Internet Explorer™.  

The Web is a sub-set of the Internet. There are other sub-sets in widespread use on the Internet such as "ftp" (file transfer protocol) and the "irc" - (Internet relay chat) protocol.  

In 1989 a group of scientists, led by Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland (the CERN team) began working on a new branch of Internet protocols that offered a new way of linking documents, files and addressing on the Internet. Berners-Lee called the project, World Wide Web (the Web). They developed a HyperText Transfer Protocol which is mostly referred to by its initials, http -  the beginning of every website address. The protocol is a set of rules that enable every document on the Internet to be connected to every other document via a hyperlink, a link that the author can place anywhere in the document. The link may enable a user to jump to another document within the same website or to a totally different document or website.  

A website is a set of interlinked files containing words, images, video and sound and usually links to other websites, all of which have been coded so that computers using http can find the sites and see their content. People with appropriate software, typically "browsers", can interact with whatever activities are available, such as selecting images to print or selecting and paying for goods and services.  

A crucial characteristic of this protocol is that it is "stateless" so that each access, by each user, is entirely independent of prior accesses. As a stateless protocol, http is perfect for viewing static objects, not changed by a user's interaction.  

With the hypertext transfer protocol established, it was then necessary to construct a computer language for creating documents that used the hyperlink function. The language devised to create these web documents with their hyperlinks was called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). The language provides the means by which programmers not only can create hyperlinks to other documents but can specify such things as what text, images, sound and video are displayed on the screen and their layout, the various font types and sizes to be used and colour schemes.