Manifestos & announcements · 1991
WorldWideWeb: the announcement on alt.hypertext
alt.hypertext · 6 August 1991
Tim Berners-Lee’s two Usenet posts of 6 August 1991 that described the WorldWideWeb project and offered its software.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
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- A2
- License
- W3C Document License
- Source
- w3.org
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Tim Berners-Lee, 1991
Theme
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Edition
The two articles that Tim Berners-Lee posted to alt.hypertext on 6 August 1991, as archived in plain text on w3.org and linked from https://www.w3.org/History.html: art-6484.txt (“Re: Qualifiers on Hypertext links...”, which https://web30.web.cern.ch/web-history.html calls the first announcement) and art-6487.txt (“WorldWideWeb: Summary”). They are reproduced line for line in a monospaced font, headers and signatures included, tabs at eight columns; only the line ends (CR LF) and the blank lines at the end of each file are dropped. The kicker, the title, the author line and the byline come from the headers and signatures of the posts.
Rights
Permission to copy, and distribute the contents of this document, or the W3C document from which this statement is linked, in any medium for any purpose and without fee or royalty is hereby granted, provided that you include the following on ALL copies of the document, or portions thereof, that you use: A link or URL to the original W3C document. The pre-existing copyright notice of the original author, or if it doesn’t exist, a notice (hypertext is preferred, but a textual representation is permitted) of the form: “Copyright © [$date-of-document] World Wide Web Consortium. https://www.w3.org/copyright/document-license-2023/” If it exists, the STATUS of the W3C document.
W3C document license, https://www.w3.org/copyright/document-license-2023/, which opens with “Public documents on the W3C site are provided by the copyright holders under the following license.”; the W3C intellectual rights page, https://www.w3.org/copyright/intellectual-rights/, adds “Unless otherwise stated, documents on the W3C site are published under the W3C document license.” The two files state nothing else and carry no copyright notice of their own, so the footer gives the notice in the form the license prescribes, with the URLs of both documents; they have no STATUS. The license grants no right to modify them, and they are reproduced unchanged.
