This is due to the monthly fluctuations in the count of inactive websites. After reaching 1 billion websites in September 2014, a milestone confirmed by NetCraft in its October 2014 Web Server Survey and that Internet Live Stats was the first to announce-as attested by this tweet from the inventor of the World Wide Web himself, Tim Berners-Lee-the number of websites in the world have subsequently declined, reverting to a level below 1 billion.

In February 2009, Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, reported that there were 215,675,903 websites with domain names and content on them in 2009, compared to just 19,732 websites in August 1995. All major style guides, such as The Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook, have reflected this change. While 'web site' was the original spelling (sometimes capitalized 'Web site', since 'Web' is a proper noun when referring to the World Wide Web), this variant has become rarely used, and 'website' has become the standard spelling.

Documents were most often presented as plain text files without formatting or were encoded in word processor formats. These protocols offer a simple directory structure in which the user navigates and where they choose files to download. The World Wide Web ( Before the introduction of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), other protocols such as File Transfer Protocol and the gopher protocol were used to retrieve individual files from a server.

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