libwww-perl provides an application programming interface (API) to an HTTP client as well as a number of HTML utilities, and standard objects to represent HTTP requests and responses.
The first generation of libwww-perl was written by Roy Fielding using version 4.036 of Perl.
Fielding's work on libwww-perl provided a backend HTTP interface for his MOMSpider Web crawler.
Fielding's work on libwww-perl was informed by Tim Berners-Lee's work on libwww, and helped to clarify the architecture of the Web that was eventually documented in HTTP v1.0.
The second generation of libwww-perl was based on version 5.004 of Perl, and written by Martijn Koster and Gisle Aas.