THE World Wide Web

The World Wide Web - which is also called the WWW, or just the Web - is rapidly becoming one of the most popular services available on Internet. It has pictures and hypertext - which means you can jump from one place to another, all over the world, with a single click of the mouse or a few keys typed on a keyboard.

The Web was started in Switzerland by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. The people at CERN wanted to build a hypermedia system with hyper links to other systems so it would be easier to use the Internet.

It is the most user-friendly part of Internet. The hypertext can contain text, pictures, sound, and even video information where many of the other Internet services are limited to text only.

The advantage of using hypertext is that in a hypertext document, if you want more information about the particular subject, you can usually just click on it with your mouse to read further details.

Documents can also be (and often are) linked to other documents by completely different authors - much like the footnotes in your textbooks at school.

To access the Web, you need to run a Web browser program. The Web browser reads documents and can display pictures. And, when you click on a hypertext link, it can fetch documents from other sources on the Internet.

Web browsers can read documents and can also download them to your computer's hard disk. Web browsers can access files by FTP, they can read Usenet newsgroups, and they can Telnet into remote computer sites - almost everything you want. Some servers have search capabilities, which means you can locate documents and databases by searching for specific words and phrases.

What is really so special about the Web is that the Web does all of this without you having to know the exact address of where you are, or even how you got there! To do this it uses something called URLs - Uniform Resource Locators. URLs are addresses for the location of any Internet resource.

When browsing the Web, you are going to see things such as:

http://www.library.edu/books/pages.html

The http means you are dealing with a Web resource. It stands for HyperText Transport Protocol. HTTP is just a coding system for marking up documents with little markers that change the way the information is seen on the screen. URL addresses are case sensitive, so be careful when typing them. Library, with a capital "L", is not the same as library with a small "I". In the above address, the last item ends in html. That stands for HyperText Markup Language. You will find a lot of Web addresses ending in html.

Task:

Write down the aspects / words you don't understand in the previous text. Try to find explanations from the context. Think of your own, personal metaphor for the www.

adapted from: http://schoolnet2.carleton.ca/english

The Romeo & Juliet Internet Project Starting Page: The World Wide Web