World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as the Web or WWW) is a system of Internet servers that support hypertext to access several Internet protocols on a single interface. Almost every protocol type available on the Internet is accessible on the Web. This includes e-mail, FTP, Telnet, and Usenet News. In addition to these, the World Wide Web has its own protocol: Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. The World Wide Web provides a single interface for accessing all these protocols. This creates a convenient and user-friendly environment. The Web gathers together all protocols into a single system. Because of this feature, and because of the Web’s ability to work with multimedia and advanced programming languages, the World Wide Web is the fastest- growing component of the Internet. The operation of the Web relies primarily on hypertext as its means of information retrieval. Hyper Text is a document containing words that connect to other documents. These words are called links and are selectable by the user. A single hypertext document can contain links to many documents. In the context of the Web, words o graphics may serve as links to other documents, images, video, and sounds. Producing hypertext for the web is accomplished by creating documents with a language called Hyper Text Markup Language, or HTLM. The World Wide Web consists of files, called pages or home pages, containing links to documents and resources throughout the Internet.

The Web provides a vast array of experiences including multimedia presentations, real-time collaboration, interactive pages, radio and television broadcasts, and the automatic “push” of information to a client computer. Programming languages such as Java, JavaScript and Visual Basic are extending the capabilities of the Web. An increasing amount of information on the Web is served dynamically from content stored in databases. The Web is therefore not a fixed entity, but one that is in a constant state of flux.