The Worldwide Web (WWW or now commonly called the Web) was conceived in 1989 at the Partical Physics Lab. in CERN, Geneva, and first came into being in 1991. It was developed from scratch as a method of sharing information and exchanging ideas. It was also designed to be distributed; related information could be held on servers on different computers; the task of the WWW client being to navigate between them as seamlessly as possible.
The Worldwide Web uses hypertext; WWW documents can have hypertext links which let you jump from one document to another. The link is a piece of text (or graphic), often highlighted; selecting the link takes you to a follow-up document.
To make the use of hypertext documents possible requires yet another Internet protocol HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The documents themselves are marked up using HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML).