Internet and the World Wide Web

  • What is the Internet?

  • What is the World Wide Web?

  • The relationship between the Internet and the World Wide Web.

  • Related sites


    • What is the Internet?

    The Internet is the name for a vast, worldwide system consisting people, information and computers. The Internet is so large and complex as to be well beyond the comprehension of a single human being. Not only is there no one who understands all of the Internet, there is no one who even understands most of the Internet.

    Many people were initially attracted to the Internet because it connected them to the world at large. They could exchange electronic mail, participate in discussions, and easily exchange programs and data with others around the world using the Internet.

    Technically, the Internet isn't a network of computers - it's a network of networks. Local networks throughout the world are tied together by wires, telephone lines, fiber-optic cables, microwave transmissions, and satellites in orbit. But the details of how data gets from one computer on the Internet to another are invisible to the user.


    What is the World Wide Web?

    The recent surge in media coverage of the Internet has focused on new Internet services instead of tried-and-true ones, such as mail. The service that has caught the press's eye the most is the World Wide Web, or the web for short.

    The Web works well with graphical user interfaces - such as Windows and the Macintosh - and many people think that the Web is thus easier to use than other services. The World Wide Web is the most visual part of the Internet. It is also the fastest growing part of the Internet, which may be because it is so easy to access and explore.

    It is based on the display of Web pages, which are computer documents that can present text, graphics and sounds. The Web is an Internet service that lets users retrieve hypertext and graphics from various sites. The Web has become one of the most popular Internet services in the past years. In fact, many Internet information providers publish using only the Web.


    Additional informations about the World Wide Web

  • Accessing the Web
  • Using Hypertext
  • Interacting with Other Services
  • Publishing on the Web

    • Relationship between the Internet and the World Wide Web.

    The Internet is made up of host computers linked together by a dedicated broadband telecommunications connection, known as the backbone. The connection is dedicated, because it is always "open". That is, once the computer is connected to the backbone, the connection is always active, just as if you took a telephone off the hook, made a call, and never hung up on that call. The connection is boardband in that it can transmit large amounts of data simultaneously. Other computers tap into the backbone by connecting to host computers linked directly to the Internet background, typically using connections that are somewhat slower. In turn, these computers connect to other computers, which in turn link to other computers, and so on, until you have a complicated network of computers all joined together, either over dedicated phone lines or as is the case with individual users at home, via dial-up lines.

    With so many computers linking to the Internet, they need a common language to "talk" to one another. That language is a series of protocols that describe the data that is sent across the network and explain what to do with it when it reaches its destination. The most fundamental of Internet protocols is called TCP/IP, or Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol. In short, TCP/IP is an envelope in which data resides. The TCP protocol tells the computers what's in the envelope and the IP protocol tells computers where to send the package.

    On top of this system of computers and connections is the Web. You can think of the Web as an application, much like a database, and think of the Internet as the operating system. In fact, the Web is an elaborate distributed database of documents, graphics and other multimedia elements. As you "surf" the Web, you use a browser to request data from the database and to display that data when the request is fulfilled by the server that processes the request and sends the desired data back to your computer.

    To be clear, the Web is not a system separate from the Internet. Instead it is a system that rides on top of the Internet. The Internet itself is a series of interconnected networks, in essence a network of networks. The Web is really a system of protocols exchanged between a client (your computer) and a server (the host computer's application that delivers Web pages) in order that documents can be shared among computers on the network. From the above information, we learnt that the Internet will be the "operating system" and the Web will be the "application".


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