NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System User's Guide

## The Web and Hypermedia

The World Wide Web (Web) originated at CERN, the particle physics institute in Geneva, Switzerland. The Web, sometimes abbreviated WWW, is a worldwide hypermedia information space providing ready access to a variety of documents contained on servers connected to the Internet. In this case, document refers to a file of any type (e.g., text, graphic, video) that can be stored on a Web server and viewed by Web client software.

Hypermedia organizes information as an interconnected web of associations rather than as a linear sequence (which you find in a book). Scattered within a hypermedia document are hyperlinks (words or images that are highlighted) to other related documents. Clicking on a hyperlink brings up a new document. In turn, that document links to others, and so it goes.

Most documents available on Web servers are linked, meaning that hyperlinks embedded in the documents connect all the documents in some way. For example, NCSA Mosaic documentation contains links to documents on the NCSA Web server as well to documents on servers maintained by other universities and research laboratories. Those Web servers have documents that, in turn, link to other documents on other servers.