World-Wide Web: An Information Infrastructure for High-Energy Physics

The World-Wide Web (W3) initiative encourages physicists to share information using wide-area networks. The W3 software provides easy hypertext navigation and information retrieval in a consistent manner to a vast store of existing data and future hypertext. The client-server architecture uses global conventions for document identifiers, a set of common access protocols, and an ever-widening set of transfer formats. The HTTP protocol is introduced which allows servers, sometimes simple shell scripts, to provide data and take advantage of a range of hypertext browsers on many platforms. Existing data may be put on the "web" by a gateway without affecting data management procedures. Internet archives, news, "WAIS" and "Gopher" systems are already included in the web. The future will see multiple data formats being handled by negotiation between client and server, and hypertext editors bringing collaborative authorship in the information universe.