The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility
that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across
languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as
the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the
Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that
support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design
components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support.

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may
supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical
report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/.

This is the 15 December 2004 Recommendation of \u201cArchitecture of the World Wide Web, Volume
One.\u201d This document has been reviewed by W3C Members, by software developers, and by other W3C
groups and interested parties, and is endorsed by the Director as a W3C Recommendation. It is a
stable document and may be used as reference material or cited from another document. W3C's role
in making the Recommendation is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread
deployment. This enhances the functionality and interoperability of the Web.

This document was developed by W3C's Technical Architecture Group (TAG), which, bycharter
maintains a list of architectural issues. The scope of this document is a useful subset of those issues;
it is not intended to address all of them. The TAG intends to address the remaining (and future) issues
now that Volume One is published as a W3C Recommendation. A complete history of changes so this
document is available. Please send comments on this document to public-webarch-comments@w3.org
(public archive of public-webarch-comments). TAG technical discussion takes place on www-
tag@w3.org (public archive of www-tag).

This document was produced under the W3C IPR policy of the July 2001 Process Document. The TAG
maintains a public list of patent disclosures relevant to this document; that page also includes
instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual knowledge of a patent which the
individual believes contains Essential Claim(s) with respect to this specification should disclose the
information in accordance with section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.

The World Wide Web (WWW, or simplyWeb) is an information space in which the items of interest, referred to as resources, are identified by global identifiers called Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI).

Examples such as the following travel scenario are used throughout this document to illustrate typical behavior of Web agents\u2014people or software acting on this information space. A user agent acts on behalf of a user. Software agents include servers, proxies, spiders, browsers, and multimedia players.

While planning a trip to Mexico, Nadia reads \u201cOaxaca weather information:
'http://weather.example.com/oaxaca'\u201d in a glossy travel magazine. Nadia has enough experience with
the Web to recognize that "http://weather.example.com/oaxaca" is a URI and that she is likely to be
able to retrieve associated information with her Web browser. When Nadia enters the URI into her
browser: