By definition, the "web" is HTTP. Of course there were files hosted on servers prior to the WWW. Including direct predecessors such as, as you mention, Gopher. But they weren't the web.
I browsed the web before CERN published their HTTP server and clients. E.g. the newsgroups were called Internet long before. The Web was the abbrevation of Internet.
WWW was the multimedia enriched variant of the web, with a XML format and a state-less server. State-less on purpose, in constrast to the existing stateful servers those days, with proper login and the server keeping each clients state. This didn't scale, so the worse and simplier WWW technology succeeded. Cookies had to be invented to catch up.
I actually just looked at my 1992 copy of The Whole Internet from O'Reilly. The World Wide Web (WWW) is very specifically used to refer to the CERN project and not Gopher et al.
"The World-Wide Web, or WWW, is the newest information service to arrive on the Internet."
That the web is conflated with the internet in many minds doesn't mean they actually are the same thing.
