The World Wide Web

What is the World Wide Web?

• The World Wide Web (WWW) is most often called the Web.

• The Web is a network of computers all over the world.

• All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.

• All the computers use a communication standard called HTTP.

How does the  WWW work?

• Web information is stored in documents called Web pages. 

• Web pages are files stored on computers called Web servers.

• Computers reading the Web pages are called Web clients.

• Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web browser.

• Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

How does the browser fetch the pages?

• A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request.

• A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address.

• A page address looks like this: http://www.someone.com/page.htm.

How does the browser display the pages?

• All Web pages contain instructions for display

• The browser displays the page by reading these instructions.

• The most common display instructions are called HTML tags.

• HTML tags look like this <p>This is a Paragraph</p>.

Who is making the Web standards?

• The Web standards are not made up by Netscape or Microsoft.

• The rule-making body of the Web is the W3C.

• W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium.

• W3C puts together specifications for Web standards.

• The most essential Web standards are HTML, CSS and XML.

• The latest HTML standard is XHTML 1.0.

Internet Joke

Customer: "I don't have a computer. Is the internet available in book form?"