The World Wide Web
Many people use the
terms Internet and World Wide Web (or just the
Web) interchangeably, but, as discussed above, the two terms
are not synonymous.
The World Wide Web is
a huge set of interlinked documents, images and other resources,
linked by
hyperlinks and
URLs. These
hyperlinks and URLs allow the web servers and other machines
that store originals, and cached copies, of these resources to
deliver them as required using
HTTP (Hypertext
Transfer Protocol). HTTP is only one of the communication
protocols used on the Internet.
Web services also use
HTTP to allow software systems to communicate in order to share
and exchange business logic and data.
Software products that
can access the resources of the Web are correctly termed
user agents. In
normal use, web
browsers, such as
Internet Explorer and
Firefox, access web
pages and allow users to navigate from one to another via
hyperlinks. Web documents may contain almost any combination of
computer data including photographs, graphics, sounds, text,
video, multimedia and interactive content including games,
office applications and scientific demonstrations.
Through
keyword-driven
Internet research
using
search engines like
Yahoo! and
Google, millions of
people worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast and diverse
amount of online information. Compared to
encyclopedias and
traditional
libraries, the World
Wide Web has enabled a sudden and extreme decentralization of
information and data.
It is also easier,
using the Web, than ever before for individuals and
organisations to publish ideas and information to an extremely
large audience. Anyone can find ways to publish a web page or
build a website for very little initial cost. Publishing and
maintaining large, professional websites full of attractive,
diverse and up-to-date information is still a difficult and
expensive proposition, however.
Many individuals and
some companies or groups use "web logs" or
blogs, which are
largely, used as easily updatable the online diaries. Some
commercial organizations encourage staff to fill them with
advice on their areas of specialization in the hope that
visitors will be impressed by the expert knowledge and free
information, and be attracted to the corporation as a result.
One example of this practice is
Microsoft, whose
product
developers publish
their personal blogs in order to pique the public's interest in
their work.
Collections of
personal web pages published by large service providers remain
popular, and have become increasingly sophisticated. Whereas
operations such as
Angelfire and
GeoCities have
existed since the early days of the Web, newer offerings from,
for example,
Facebook and
MySpace currently
have large followings. These operations often brand themselves
as
social network services
rather than simply as web page hosts.
Advertising on
popular web pages can be lucrative, and
e-commerce or the
sale of products and services directly via the Web continues to
grow.
In the early days, web
pages were usually created as sets of complete and isolated
HTML text files
stored on a web server. More recently, websites are more often
created using
content management system
(CMS) or
wiki software with,
initially, very little content. Contributors to these systems,
who may be paid staff, members of a club or other organisation
or members of the public, fill underlying databases with content
using editing pages designed for that purpose, while casual
visitors view and read this content in its final HTML form.
There may or may not be editorial, approval and security systems
built into the process of taking newly entered content and
making it available to the target visitors.
(Adapted from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet)
|
