There was initially some kind of dream. Along with the primordial soup of Internet.

Physicists have information in all sorts of document formats. Especially CERN physicists, who are trying to puzzle together the answers to perhaps some of the most elusive problems in the universe.

One particular theoretical physicists was extremely irritated by the overhead of having to install software, just to look at documents on a PC. He started working on the World Wide Web. You can watch the history in a really inspiring video from Berners-Lee himself:

Spin the world forward in time some 30 years and we’ve got the situation right now, 2022.

To begin, it might be good to know how web browsers work. Freecodecamp has excellent tutorials for learning web page authoring. Web pages can represent both static information as well as fully functional apps. W3C has documented extensively the Elements.

In addition to W3C we also have the living standard of HTML, as the development process is sometimes quite rapid. The WhatWG living standard has a great FAQ.

Problems and solutions in Web?

• Brendan Eich: How to Fix the Web? [TEDxVienna 2016] talks about how the original spirit of the freedom and transparency of Web may have been sacrificed for commercial interests, and what could we do to fix that
• Professor and techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci: We’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads [TEDGlobal, NYC 2017]

Long stories about generic web history from various viewpoints

• Brendan Eich interview by Lex Friedman [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE ]