Back to Internet 101

Question: What is the WWW?

Answer: The World Wide Web - WWW - W3 - Web refers to the massive collection of multimedia information available over the internet. Although the World Wide Web is often referred to as the internet they are actually two different things.

The internet is the global collection of computers that transfer information and the wiring that make all of this possible. The World Wide Web is a smaller part of the internet. The World Wide Web refers to the documents and related multimedia rich information that uses a specific Internet Protocol called HTTP. Since the WWW is a subset of the Internet it stands to reason that the Web could not exist without the internet - however - the Internet would still be the Internet without the Web (although not as nice).

Mosaic was the first client used to access the Web. Mosaic was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and became available to the Internet community in the first half of 1993.

The web talks to computers through the HTTP protocol. More specifically these pages are being displayed through HTML, or the HyperText Markup Language, which tells the Web browser how to display the information with it's pictures and text. One of the defining features of the Web is its ability to connect pages to one another with hyperlinks. That's why you can click your way around on the internet. (Or should I say web there?)

Other applications prior to the Mosaic type of browsing relied on a persons knowledge of Internet addressing, hierarchical directory structures, and the application's own set of commands. The browsers that we are familiar with today have simplified all this so we can just click on words - or pictures - to get where we want to go.

This simplistic approach to navigating around the web has been a big factor in the success of the internet. The web with all of its multimedia aspects has become a world wide phenomena. It doesn't take long to show someone how to click on a link and they are off exploring interests of their choice.

Answer: HTML has been developed and expanded from its original set of commands. There are many new exciting technologies that are changing the web as we know it today. It is continuously changing.

14804

Back to Internet 101