By any other name: was: an Idea for a new WWW disc. group

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Date: Fri, 5 Feb 93 14:52:32 +0100
From: Tim Berners-Lee <timbl@www3.cern.ch>
Message-id: <9302051352.AA01621@www3.cern.ch>
To: "(Arnold Bloemer)" <bloemer@helios.tnt.uni-hannover.dbp.de>
Subject: By any other name: was: an Idea for a new WWW disc. group
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Reply-To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch

A lot of people have to type in newsgroup names.  They just won't  
read comp.infosystems.world-wide-web!  www is no more crypict than  
wais, and gopher is not very explanatory for all its uniqueness.

> Finally I would like to suggest that we come to an agreement
> on how to name the World Wide Web project in speech and writing.
> In the past I have seen the following terms:
>
> World Wide Web, World-Wide-Web, WorldWideWeb, world-wide-web,
> www, WWW, W3, w3,

We write "World-Wide Web (W3)" at the start of every paper, and W3  
from then on.

[BTW: W3 was chosen eventually because a in many languages to  
pronounce WWW takes longer than saying World-Wide Web and people just  
couldn't handle it.  So we suggest the pronounciation "double you  
three".  (We ruled out W cubed because though it is more logical you  
can't superscript in mail.  We ruled out V6 because its to cute.  We  
ruled out InfoMesh and then MIT used it. We have only found one  
company called WWW --- a technical documentation company in Freiburg  
who have a "WWW explain" product. Their advertisement doesn't say  
what WWW stands for there. (Maybe you could phone them on 0761/40 10  
221 and find out, Arnold!)

That is the project.  Filenames, logos, etc all use WWW as it is  
catchy, easy to see and type. But of course lower case is de riguer
in unix commands and ftp directories normally. Hence www.

Tim BL  (Tim B-L?  Timbl?  timbl?  TBL? tbl? sigh  :-)