What is the Internet?
The Internet is the largest global computer network. First developed in the early 1960’s, a computer network is designed to support the sharing of digital information and data between individual computers (Mowery & Simcoe, 2002). The Internet is connected through a global series of servers that act as a “repository for information files” (December, 2006). When an individual accesses the Internet, a request is made to a server that then retrieves the relevant data and information. To allow for computers to send and receive information across the Internet, a series of protocols must be used. These protocols are known as the TCP/IP protocols (Transmission Control Protocols and Internet Protocols), they define how data is exchanged on the Internet (December, 2006). The Internet has developed to also provide infrastructure for applications such as email, file sharing and the World Wide Web.
What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW or Web) is an application that relies on the Internet to function. The WWW was first developed as a concept of creating a “universal database of knowledge”, a way to link information easily for anybody to access (Johnson, 1995). The World Wide Web began in 1989. A simple system was created to use hypertext to transmit documents of information across the Internet (Johnson, 1995). The language used to create documents on the Web is known as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). HTML creates the documents and pages that
The first versions of WWW ((what most people call “The Web”))) provide means for people around the world to exchange information between, to work together, to communicate, and to share documentation more efficiently. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first browser (called WWW browser) and Web server in March 1991, allowing hypertext documents to be stored, fetched, and viewed. The Web can be seen as a tremendous document store where these documents (web pages) can be fetched by typing their address into a web browser. To do that, two im- portant techniques have been developed. First, a language called Hypertext Markup Languag (HTML) tells the computers how to display documents which contain texts, photos, sounds, visuals (video), and animation, interactive
But how does it work? The internet, based on the concept of “packet switching”, involves the travelling of small packets of data over one or more networks (Frenzel, 2013). This can be compared to “electronic postcards”, meaning that “a computer generates a piece of data and flings it into the net, just like the postal system, except 100 million times faster” (Cerf, 2013). This concept allows one computer to speak to many different computers around the network by sending out these “electronic postcards”. However, before these networks can work seamlessly together, they must use a common protocol, or set of rules for transmitting and receiving these packets of data. There are several protocols currently in use, including the OSI Model, the TCP/IP Model, UDP, HTTP, and FDP (Mitchell, 2014), but the most commonly used is Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) (Gilmer, 2011). Even as early as 1977, TCP/IP was being used by other networks to link to ARPANET (Kozierok,
The World Wide Web is established on numerous different technologies that make it possible for users to find and share data through the internet. For example there are Web browsers, HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and HTML (hypertext Markup language).
The internet is a global network of millions of computers which help exchange news, emails, and opinion polls to more than one hundred countries. They are all connected through different local area networks and web servers, which are connected around the world through transoceanic cables.
The internet, as it stands today, serves as a medium for our entertainment, communication, and commercial needs. It is something many of us have come to take for granted. The original intended purpose of the first “internet,” however, goes back to the days of the Cold War where the ever looming threat of a nuclear missile attack prompted the U.S., as well as many other countries, to build a robust, fault-tolerant, and widely distributed computer network. By 1970, ARPANET had
Over the next 10 years, we will see a change in technology, and the Internet. Things will continue to progress, and fundamental changes will easily be defined. Technologies have revolutionized how people spread and consume information; these changes will redefine who we are as consumers, merchants, and individuals. With the expansion of computers and the Internet connectivity, people are able to share more of their lives with family and friends. Technology has offered the world so many different services, which include emailing, instant messaging, search engines, blogs, and Wikipedia. These services have changed the way we communicate with others, our knowledge, and the way we conduct business. With the increasing usage of the Internet, developers continue to find ways to improve technology and the way we utilize the Internet. Technology has a wide range of different aspects and concepts, which includes protocols. There has to be rules, and objectives in any and everything we do, and protocols governs communications, errors, detections, messages, and speed. There are three technology concepts behind the Internet, and they are packet switching, Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communications
Created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the World Wide Web is still very young. Berners-Lee initially developed three of the fundamental technologies that are the foundation of today’s web. Specifically, Berners-Lee created the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) – the markup language of the web, Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) – a unique address used to identify each resource on the web, and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – a way to send and retrieve resources on the web. Additionally, Berners-Lee also created the first web-browser, called “WorldWideWeb.app”, and the first web-server, called “httpd” (World Wide Web Foundation). In 1994, Berner-Lee’s colleague, Hakum Wium Lie introduced the world to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a language used to format and “style” the appearance of HTML webpages (Lie, 1994). As the web began growing and expanding, Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization which creates standards for the web. One of the first major standards introduced by the W3C is the idea of the Document Object Model (DOM), a way of describing webpages as a tree structure, where each node is an object that represents part of the document (W3C, 2005). The DOM is the fundamental principle that allows programmers to manipulate individual sections of webpages programmatically.
There were two main historical developments that led to the development of the World Wide Web. Starting in 1930, writer and futurist HG Wells came up with the idea of a “World Brain.” In explaining his idea he said, “The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica” (Campell-Kelly, 19). HG Wells’ concept was revolutionary at the time, however, there were still many technological developments that needed to be created in order to make his concept come to life. It was not until after the World War 2 that Vannevar Bush, an MIT graduate, brought Wells’ idea to the United States in order to compliment what he deemed as “an information explosion.”
Over the last several years, the Internet has become a central location where people are able to learn about new ideas and more effectively communicate with one another. What makes everything work is the basic infrastructure that is utilized to allow them to transmit data instantaneously. To fully understand the way this is achieved requires focusing on: packets / routers, IP addresses and the advantages of private / public IP addresses. Together, these elements will highlight how they work in conjunction with each other to connect various electronic devices to a host of platforms. (Parson, 2010) (Wyld, 2011)
Today, tens of millions of people use the Internet. Whether it’s for business or multimedia, people log on to the web everyday. The most popular use for the internet is communication. Businesses, individuals, and
The relationship between the World Wide Web and the Internet is without one, the other can not exist. The WWW can be considered an application of the Internet. The Internet enables the WWW to offer an ever-expanding array of functions and services. These include: online chat or instant messaging, content sharing, gaming, blogs, streaming media, social networking, virtual worlds etc., as mentioned by Fetter (2009).
Internet is an essential source for communicating and interacting with people around worldwide. Web browsers are software programs are software applications which allows millions of users to access the web content either for business, entertainment or personal use. the “WWW” portion of internet stands for world wide web. WWW made up of hyperlinked documents written in “XHTML & Interactive Media”.
Hypermedia systems and hypertext have given a universal access to a big number of documents over the Internet, and the World Wide Web was the most successful and popular one to link the biggest amount of hypertext documents from all over the world, despite the existence of other sophisticated hypermedia systems in time. These systems specialized with richer navigation experience, and were competing with the W3. This report will be focusing on the aspects that enhanced and empowered the success and achievements of the World
Computers play a huge role in our lives today and are an essential aspect of our day to day lives. However, computers did not just immediately come into existence. Over a span of more than 100 years, computers have come a long way and will continue to evolve in the future. Computers are continuously improving in both hardware and software design. In addition, new computers with faster processing speed, more memory space, and improved clock speed are always being developed and brought into the marketplace. However, one thing that will continue to remain the same in all computers and continue to serve the same purpose is the World Wide Web, more commonly referred to as the Web or the web. Similar to the development of computers, the World Wide Web was not created overnight, but took time, effort, and brainpower to invent. We can credit this fascinating invention that connects everyone in the world to British physicist and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
The World Wide Web (WWW) also known as the Internet is a system of servers specifically for the Internet to support specially created documents. These documents are created also specifically for the internet in a mark-up language called HTML also know as Hyper Text Mark-up Language that supports links to other documents, graphics and audio/video files. This means you can go from one document to another by clicking on the links in the documents which with the World Wide Web they can be anywhere in the world.