The World Wide Web consists of those connected computers which run a universally standard language known as HTML (hypertext markup language), and is a subset of the Internet as a whole.  HTML is yet another 'protocol', enabling the graphic layout format that you are seeing now.  Creating Web pages has a lot in common with regular, atomic magazine and book publishing.  However, what is effective on one medium does not necessarily work aesthetically in the other.  For example, long sections of text are easier and pleasanter to read from paper (which is why we provide a quick-print download option for our longer articles on this site). 

HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.  His attempt at making scientific document exchange more convenient became the worldwide, cross-platform standard.  The language has been developed extensively since he created it in the early nineties, and its universal compatibility is regulated rigorously.  Much of the standards committee's time is spent incorporating functional extensions of the language into the standard, and ensuring that the more powerful computer companies such as Sun, Apple and Microsoft write compatible code which is not too biased towards their platforms.