Scope of article

This article gives a technical description of the World-Wide Web (or w3) initiative's architecture, protocols and data formats. The dream of global hypertext with full text retrieval has been described in our ENRAP paper, which also discusses a little the difference betwen W3 and some other network information retrieval systems, for which it contains references. An introduction to the W3 for system managers has been given in the AIHEP paper. Here we give technical details for those who are interested in how W3 works, and why it has been designed in that way.