The World Wide Web, commonly referred to as just "the Web", is a recent technological innovation which has brought up many new questions of authorship in the future. The concept of the Web was begun in 1989, first went on-line in 1990, but only within the past two years has it received a great deal of attention and expansion. The Web has brought together people from throughout the world in a situation which redefines the relationship between author and reader, and brings up many new questions of how reader and author will act in the future.

The World Wide Web was set up in 1990 by the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (or CERN), as a way for physicists to track each others progress (Roush). The idea was that people working in different places could learn what each other was doing by looking at a hypertextual document set up on a computer which could be accessed through the Internet. This idea grew into the much bigger and large-scale operation that we now know as the Web. There are currently well over 10,000 Web servers (Roush), the computers which store and handle requests for Web pages, and a great number of people all over the world access the Web for various reasons every day.

The Web is continually being enhanced and developed, due to rapid technological changes and the addressing of various questions and problems raised by the current state of the Web. In October, 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded (Roush). The Consortium\'s stated purpose is to "support the advancement of information technology in the field of networking, graphics and user interface by evolving the World Wide Web toward a true information infrastructure, and to encourage cooperation in the industry through the promotion and development of standard interfaces in the information envroment known as the 'World Wide Web.' (Berners-Lee, Appendix 1).

The W3C consists of a number of companies interested in the promotion of an interactive Web, and is headquartered at MIT (Roush). This organization will likely be the primary source of the newest innovations to the Web, and a sort of governing body for the Web. Tim Berners-Lee, who while at CERN created the original Web standards, is now the director of W3C (Roush).