World Wide Web, library of resources available to computer users through the global Internet. It enables users to view a wide variety of information, including magazine archives, public and college library resources, and current world and business news. World Wide Web (WWW) resources are organized so that users can easily move from one resource to another. The connections to different source computers, or servers, on the network are made automatically without being seen by the user. These connections are made with the use of hypertext and hypermedia.   Users generally navigate through information on the WWW with the aid of a program known as a WWW browser, or client. The browser presents text, images, sound, or other information objects on the user's computer screen in the form of a page, which is obtained from a WWW server. The user can navigate through information by pointing to specially designated text or other objects on the screen. These objects link the user to other WWW pages on the same server or on any other accessible WWW server on the network. The WWW links exist across the global Internet, forming a large-scale, distributed, multimedia knowledge base through related words, phrases, and images. Smaller-scale implementations are present on the enterprise internets used by businesses. These implementations, known as “intranets” host private data and applications and can be protected from public access through a device known as a “firewall”. WWW pages are formatted using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and WWW communication among computers uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), or Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) for mobile phones. This communication is usually through the Internet via Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections, but almost any kind of connection can be used. The WWW was developed in 1989 by Timothy Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at the CERN research facility near Geneva, Switzerland, to allow information-sharing among internationally dispersed teams of high-energy physics researchers. It subsequently became a platform for related software development, and the numbers of linked computers and users grew very rapidly to support a wide variety of endeavors, including a large business marketplace. Its further development is guided by the WWW Consortium based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Current concerns include the efficiency of search engines, the security of transactions and privacy of users, as well as preventing Internet piracy. The main prospect for WWW is its development to form a basis for electronic business. Many applications have been developed to add payment, reservation, and other interactive facilities to WWW pages.