The Web..

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a hypermedia-based system that provides a means of browsing information on the internet in a non-sequential way using hyperlinks.

The World Wide Web (Web for the short) provides a simple ‘point and click’ means of exploring the immense volume of pages of information residing on the internet (Berners-Lee, 1992; Berners-Lee et al..1994). Information on the Web is presented on Web pages. Which appear as a collection of text, graphics, pictures, sound and video. In addition a Web page can contain hyperlinks to other Web pages, which allow users to navigate in a non-sequential way through information.

Much of the Web’s success is due to the simplicity with which it allows users to provide, use, and refer to information distributed geographically around the world. Furthermore, it provides users with the ability to browse multimedia documents independently of the computer hardware being used. It is also compatible with other exiting data communication protocols, such as Gopher, FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol), and Telnet (for remote login sessions).

The Web consists of a network of computers that can act in two roles: as servers, providing information; and as clients, usually referred to as browsers, requesting information.

Much of the information on the Web is stored in documents using a language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), and browsers must understand and interpret HTML to display this documents. The protocol that governs the exchange of information between the Web server and the browser is called HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). Documents and locations within documents are identified by an address, defined as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).