36. World Wide Web

The World Wide Web, commonly called the Web or the WWW, is a tool you use on the Internet to give you access to information stored on other systems throughout the world. The documents and the Web are linked via the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). From your local host system, you activate the link to the remote host system with the information you want. The Web has powerful linking abilities to other Internet services and resources worldwide. The Web consists of a body of information protocols, conventions, standards, and concepts. Information protocols can differ greatly from one another, but there are some similarities in how they operate. For example, some Web protocols follow the client-server model.

Generally, a client tries to connect with a server, sends an information pointer or a request, receives a response, and then closes the connection with the server. The response can be a file to display pointers to other servers. Once information is available on the Web, it should be accessible from any type of computer in any country. A person can obtain the information using a simple program called a browser that lets you view Web pages, which are documents prepared for use on the Web. Web users can follow links from page to page by simply pointing to a link with the mouse and then clicking on that link. The Web site that publishes a piece of information stores that information on its Web server.

The World Wide Web is a network of computers that serve web pages. The World Wide Web is a major component of the Internet, along with email, usenet, ftp, and some other minor protocols. The term "world wide" refers to the global nature of the World Wide Web, and the term "web" refers to the interlinking of documents by means of hypertext. In simple terms, this means that documents on the Web (or WWW for short) can reference, or link to, other documents by simply stating on which machine they reside, and where on that machine. Computers that serve documents on the World Wide Web are called servers, and the programs used to connect to servers and to display web pages are called web browsers.

A technical definition of the World Wide Web is: all the resources and users on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). A broader definition comes from the organization that Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee helped found, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge." In order to transfer the documents between computers, a simple text-based protocol was needed, thus HTTP was invented. The computers that understood HTTP requests and served HTML documents in response were called servers, and the programs used to actually view the documents were called browsers. As the system of requesting and viewing documents could be used by a computer anywhere in the world by any compliant computer connected to a phone line, the system was called the World Wide Web.