The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project was started and driven by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) in an attempt to build a distributed hypermedia system. It has now become one of the most frequently used and fastest growing information retrieval systems on the Internet.

To access the Web, you run a browser program. The browser reads documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers set up hypermedia servers from which browsers can retrieve documents.

The browsers can, in addition, access files by FTP, NNTP (the Internet news protocol), Gopher, WAIS and an ever-increasing range of other methods. On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of documents and databases.

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents. Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.

Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations.