World Wide Web (redirected from Www g)

World Wide Web (WWW or W3), collection of globally distributed text and multimedia documents and files and other network services linked in such a way as to create an immense electronic library from which information can be retrieved quickly by intuitive searches. The Web represents the application of hypertext technology and a graphical interface to the Internet to retrieve information that is contained in specially formatted documents that may reside in the same computer or be distributed across many computers around the world. It consists of three main elements. The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) comprises the programming codes, or tags, that define fonts, layouts, embedded graphics, and links (hyperlinks) to other documents accessible via the Web. The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) defines a set of standards for transmitting Web pages across the Internet. The Universal Resource Locator (URL) is a standardized naming convention for identifying a Web document or file, in a sense the address of a link. The result is called the Web because it is made up of many sites, all linked together, with users traveling from one site to the next by clicking a computer's pointing device on a hyperlink.

Web sites, also called Web pages, are really Internet sites that all use the same techniques and HTML tags to create multimedia documents with hypertext links. Each Web page can contain many screens or printed pages of text, graphics, audio, and even video, and the starting point for any Web site is called its home page. Although each page is an Internet site, it must be accessed via a special program called a Web browser, which can translate the HTML into the graphical images, text, and hypertext links intended by the creator of the page.

Interactive television is a generic term that encompasses a variety of Web-related television technologies and products. Typically, a home television receiver and a telephone line are connected through a small appliance that accesses the Internet through the telephone line and converts the downloaded Web pages into a form that can be displayed on the receiver. A remote control interface allows the user to navigate through the Web and select the information to be displayed.

Ted Nelson, an American computer consultant, had promoted the idea of linking documents via hypertext during the 1960s, but the technology required was not to be available for another 20 years. The foundation of what we now think of as the Web originated with work done on the retrieval of information from distributed systems by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN during the 1980s. This culminated in the introduction of a text-only interface, or browser, to the scientific community in 1990 and to the public in 1991. Because of the difficulty of using this version, acceptance outside the scientific and academic communities was slow. Marc Andreessen, an undergraduate student working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), developed a graphical browser for the Web, introducing a UNIX version in 1993. Versions for the Windows and Macintosh operating systems followed in 1994, and acceptance of the World Wide Web blossomed quickly. In the late 1990s the development of improved browsers with greater multimedia functionality, security, and privacy, as well as more powerful search engines capable of indexing the ever greater information on the Web, led to the commercialization of the Internet (see e-commerce).

Bibliography

See P. Whitehead and R. Maran, Internet and World Wide Web: Simplified (2d ed. 1997); E. Wilde, Wilde's WWW: Technical Foundations of the World Wide Web (1997); A. Glossbrenner and E. Glossbrenner, Search Engines: For the World Wide Web (2d ed. 1998); S. Western, The Complete Beginner's Guide to the World Wide Web (1998); T. Berners-Lee and M. Fischetti, Weaving the Web (1999).

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World Wide Web (WWW)

 or Web

Leading information-exchange service of the Internet. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN and introduced to the world in 1991. The Web gives users access to a vast array of documents that are connected to each other by means of hypertext or hyperlinks. A hypertext document with its corresponding text and hyperlinks is written in HTML and is assigned an on-line address, or URL. The Web operates within the Internet's basic client-server architecture. Individual HTML files with unique electronic addresses are called Web pages, and a collection of Web pages and related files (such as graphics files, scripted programs, and other resources) sharing a set of similar addresses (see domain name) is called a Web site. The main or introductory page of a Web site is usually called the site's home page. Users may access any page by typing in the appropriate address, search for pages related to a topic of interest by using a search engine, or move quickly between pages by clicking on hyperlinks incorporated into them. Though introduced in 1991, the Web did not become truly popular until the introduction of Mosaic, a browser with a graphical interface, in 1993. Subsequently, browsers produced by Netscape and Microsoft have become predominant.

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(1) (WorldWideWeb) The first Web browser, written by Tim Berners Lee and introduced in early 1991. It ran on the NeXT platform, which was also used as the first Web server. See NeXT.

(2) (World Wide Web) A major service on the Internet. To understand exactly how the Web relates to the Internet, see Web vs. Internet. The World Wide Web is made up of "Web servers" that store and disseminate "Web pages," which are "rich" documents that contain text, graphics, animations and videos to anyone with an Internet connection.

The heart of the Web technology is the hyperlink, which connects each document to each other by its "URL" address, whether locally or in another country. "Click here" caused the Web to explode in the mid-1990s, turning the Internet into the largest shopping mall and information source in the world. It also enabled the concept of a "global server" that provides a source for all applications and data (see Web 2.0).

The Browser
Web pages are accessed by the user via a Web browser application such as Internet Explorer, Netscape, Safari, Opera and Firefox. The browser renders the pages on screen, executes embedded scripts and automatically invokes additional software as needed. For example, animations and special effects are provided by browser plug-ins, and audio and video are played by media player software that either comes with the operating system or from a third party.

HTML Is the Format
A Web page is a text document embedded with HTML tags that define how the text and graphics are displayed on screen. Web pages can be created with any text editor or word processor. They are also created in HTML authoring programs that provide a graphical interface for designing the layout. Authoring programs generate the HTML tags behind the scenes, but the tags can be edited if required. Many applications export documents directly to HTML, thus basic Web pages can be created in numerous ways without HTML coding. The ease of page creation helped fuel the Web's growth.

A collection of Web pages makes up a Web site. Very large organizations deploy their Web sites on inhouse servers or on their own servers co-located in a third party facility that provides power and Internet access. Small to medium sites are generally hosted by Internet service providers (ISPs). Millions of people have developed their own mini Web sites as ISPs typically host a small number of personal Web pages at no extra cost to individual customers.

The Intranet
The public Web spawned the private "intranet," an inhouse Web site for employees. Protected via a firewall that lets employees access the Internet, the firewall restricts uninvited users from coming in and viewing internal information. There is no difference in intranet and Web architectures. It has only to do with who has access.

HTTP Can Deliver Anything
HTML pages are transmitted to the user via the HTTP protocol. A Web server stores HTML pages for a Web site, but it can also be a storehouse for any kind of file delivered to a client application via HTTP. For example, the Windows version of this Encyclopedia is available as an HTTP application. The text and images are hosted on The Computer Language Company's Web server and delivered to the Windows client in the user's PC. The Windows client is an HTTP-enabled version of the popular interface first introduced in 1996 for stand-alone PCs and client/server LANs.

Where It Came From - Where It's Going
The World Wide Web was developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva from a proposal by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. It was created to share research information on nuclear physics. In 1991, the first command line browser was introduced. By the start of 1993, there were 50 Web servers, and the Voila X Window browser provided the first graphical capability. In that same year, CERN introduced its Macintosh browser, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Chicago introduced the X Window version of Mosaic. Mosaic was developed by Marc Andreessen, who later became world famous as a principal at Netscape.

By 1994, there were approximately 500 Web sites, and, by the start of 1995, nearly 10,000. By the turn of the century, there were more than 30 million registered domain names. Many believe the Web signified the real beginning of the information age. However, those people who still use analog dial-up modems consider it the "World Wide Wait."

Everyone has some interest in the Web. ISPs, cable and telephone companies want to give you connectivity. Webmasters want more visitors. IT managers want more security. The publishing industry wants to preserve its copyrights. Hardware and software vendors want to make every product Web accessible. Nothing in the computer/communications field ever came onto the scene with such intensity. Even with the dot-com crash of 2000/2001, the future of the Web is going to be very exciting. Stay tuned! See Web 2.0, Internet, HTTP, HTML, World Wide Wait and Wild Wooly Web.

Web Linking

Accessing a Web document requires typing in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address of the home page in your Web browser. The home page contains links to other documents that can be stored on the same server or on a server anywhere in the world.