World Wide Web (WWW)
Overview
WWW stands for the World Wide Web and is commonly abbreviated as “the Web”. In short, the Web is an information space. It is a very large set of resources (interlinked hypertext documents) identified by the URIs ( Uniform Resource Identifiers) and accessed via the Internet.
Internet
The Internet is the global interconnected computer network. It is a global data communication system. It is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides connectivity between computers, and other devices. The terms World Wide Web and the Internet are often used interchangeably. However, both are different.
WWW History
World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. In 1990, he wrote a proposal for building a system called World Wide Web. He wrote the specifications for the web technologies like HTML and HTTP. He developed a system of web pages storing hypertext pages viewed by web browsers on a network.
Web Browser
A web browser is a software application that allows users to view, and edit Web pages that are hosted on web servers. Web pages contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and users can navigate between them using hyperlinks.
Examples of web browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Edge, etc. The top 5 web browsers in the IT market can be found here.
To view a Web page on the World Wide Web, the user normally begins either by typing the URL( Uniform Resource Locator) of the page into a Web browser or by clicking and following a hyperlink on a webpage to that webpage or a web resource. The Web browser then initiates a series of communication protocol messages( HTTP / HTTPS), under the hood, to fetch and display the web page to the user.
Web Server
A Web server is a software application that responds to and serves the requests made by clients. The web server should be capable of serving multiple clients simultaneously. Examples of web servers are Apache Web server, Microsoft’s IIS(Internet Information System)
W3C
The World Wide Web Consortium(W3C).W3C is an international community that develops and maintains open Internet and Web standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web. W3C homepage link: