introduction
One of the services that runs on the Internet is the WWW (World Wide Web), commonly called the web. A series of protocols such as HTTP and HTML define how the WWW works. These protocols are maintained by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium).
Many millions of web sites are distributed across the Internet. Each site contains resources for an area such as retail trade, education, communications or news. Each web site resource is supplied by a web server and consumed using a web client.
what it is
As a TLA (Three Letter Acronym), WWW is a failure because it is so difficult to say. It weighs in at a hefty nine syllables (dub ul yoo dub ul yoo dub ul yoo). Saying "World Wide Web" in full is only three syllables. If people say net because they can't be bothered to say Internet, there is no way they will say WWW. People say web instead.
WWW consists of about a zillion pages covering every subject conceived by man. Some are personal pages made by the citizens of the world as a hobby, some are serious scientific research and some are product brochures. The pages started out as text with pictures; over the years these pages have grown more complex, incorporating more complex things like audio, video, programs and games.
WWW pages and the other fancier resources are grouped together in web sites. A person may create a personal web site with pages for his family, hobbies and job. A company may create a commerce web site containing thousands of music tracks for sale to the public. There are roughly (very roughly) 40 million web sites.
WWW pages are written in a programming language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML pages are very popular interfaces to Internet resources because they are simple to use. One of the groovy innovations provided by HTML is the hyperlink, a piece of text that a reader can click on and be immediately redirected to another page. This sentence is a hyperlink to the Google search engine web site. And below is what the HTML code looks like for this link.
<a href="http://www.google.com/">This sentence is a hyperlink to the
Google search engine web site</a>
|
If a customer wants to use a service, he needs a program called a client. If a supplier wants to provide a service, he needs a program called a server. The most common WWW clients are web browsers. These display WWW pages for your delectation in glorious technicolor. The most famous ones are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Apache and Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) are types of web server. The client and the server talk to each other by following a protocol called HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol).
The client finds the server using an address created from a combination of the protocol name, the server name and a bunch of characters from the top row of the keyboard, forming a URI (Uniform Resource Indicator) like this: http://www.google.com/. The client does not have to worry about how the URI ends up at the server: the Internet takes care of carrying of page requests and pages back and forth.
what it isn't
The Internet. WWW is no more the Internet than a driver's seat is a car.
where it is
WWW is found nearly everywhere the Internet is found. Which is nearly everywhere.
history
In 1989 a clever Oxford graduate named Tim Berners-Lee was working at CERN (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, a place for clever people to do clever work). He came up with the hypertext idea. In the next couple of years he created the protocols (URI, HTTP and HTML), an HTML editor and a web server and made them available at CERN. From 1991 he spread the good word around the world and converted heathens to the WWW cause. In 1994 he founded W3C.
The growth of WWW has been faster than the growth of the Internet. In 1983 there were 562 Internet hosts. The WWW had not been invented. Ten years later in 1993 there were 1,300,000 Internet hosts and 130 web servers. In 2003 there were 130,000,000 Internet hosts and 40,000,000 web servers.
