2004-10-12: Yes. Email was already a popular application making inroads into the mainstream before the arrival of of the World Wide Web, and Gopher servers were already beginning to provide a user-friendly means of sharing information. The introduction of web browsers and HTML, however, made Internet publishing accessible to a mass audience and greatly increased demand for Internet access.

The open and free nature of the standards on which the Web is based made it possible for content providers to publish without paying license fees to any one central organization such as America Online, Compuserve or Microsoft. The nonproprietary nature of the Web drove its acceptance by those on the supply side of the equation, in turn generating new demand as new groups of users discovered websites of interest to them.

Legal Note: yes, you may use sample HTML, Javascript, PHP and other code presented above in your own projects. You may not reproduce large portions of the text of the article without our express permission.

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