What is the Web?

The World Wide Web - or simply the Web - is the premier Internet application. The web has made the Internet accessible to millions of people, from children to senior citizens. The most remarkable feature of the web is its ease of use.

Many people think the web is the same thing as the Internet, but it is not. The web is only one software application that uses the Internet. It is actually one of the newest Internet applications. The Web is the application that integrates resources from other Internet applications. This contributes to some confusion about where the Web stops and everything else begins.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a vast, ever-expanding collection of online documents and information formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) distributed over the Internet. The Web includes:

• shopping malls filled with virtual retail outlets
• private and public repositories of software
• libraries
• magazines
• news papers
• online cafes and meeting spots
• forums
• and much more!

As technology goes, the Web is a relatively young extension of the Internet, created in 1989 at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Research scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web to facilitate the sharing of scientific documents and data. Little did he realize that by helping out his physicist pals, he gave birth to one of the fastest-growing data distribution networks the world has ever seen.

The World Wide Web is a global, interactive, dynamic, cross platform, distributed, graphical hypertext information system that runs over the Internet. That's a mouthfull!

The Web is a compendium of virtually countless Web-formatted (HTML) documents, known as Web pages (the terms document and page are often interchange able). Web documents live on computers that run HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) servers. Most HTTP (Web) servers are hosted on UNIX machines; however, personal computers (PCs) and Macintosh computers can also be used.

 

 

Continue to the next section of the What is the web? - How do I access the web?