World Wide Web Day: History and Significance

World Wide Web Day is a day dedicated to web browsing and is celebrated on August 1 each year. The day aims to highlight the importance of the web in improving people's lives by facilitating communication, access to information and resources, education and empowerment. The significance of the world wide web is huge in everyday life. Not a day goes by when people across the world don’t use the world wide web in some way or the other.

In fact it can also be termed a basic necessity of life. While most people think that the World Wide Web and the Internet are the same things and use the terms interchangeably that is not the case. The World Wide Web is essentially a medium that can be accessed by people using their computers which are connected to the Internet.

The World Wide Web is the most widely used system to access the internet. The web is just one of the many services that uses the internet, others being email and internet telephony.

The World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 at the CERN center in Geneva, Switzerland, as a way for him to communicate with co-workers via hyperlinks. Berners-Lee uploaded the first image to the internet, in 1992. It was of Les Horribles Cernettes, a parody pop band founded by CERN employees. After this a significant growth was witnessed in 1993. At the start of the year, there were only 50 servers around the world. However, this number had grown to more than 500 servers being online by October of the same year. Two of the earliest webcomics also started during this period as well: NetBoy and Doctor Fun.