In 1969 four computers were successfully connected to ARPANET, creating a computer network. Things progressed quickly after that. More and more computers were added to ARPANET, and by 1972 computer scientists began to develop applications that worked over the network. One of these applications was email, called electronic mail at the time.
Another of the applications developed, although later than email, was the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 and it is the application used to create and view websites. It's also where the www. prefix of web addresses comes from. The World Wide Web is one of the primary tools that Internet users interact with.
The World Wide Web allowed for the exchange of web pages. These are primarily text documents, but they are not written in a language people speak. Instead, they're written and formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which allows the computer to read the text and display it properly. HTML also allows the computer to ‘read' images, video, audio, and software components and to display those properly as multimedia on the page.

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