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World
Wide Web
The
World Wide Web (abbreviated as the Web or WWW) is a system
of Internet servers that supports 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: Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. These
protocols will be explained later in this document.
The
World Wide Web provides a single interface for accessing all
these protocols. This creates a convenient and user-friendly
environment. It is no longer necessary to be conversant in
these protocols within separate, command-level environments.
The Web gathers together these 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 Web is the fastest-growing component of the
Internet.
The
operation of the Web relies primarily on hypertext as its
means of information retrieval. Hypertext 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 or graphics may
serve as links to other documents, images, video, and sound.
Links may or may not follow a logical path, as each
connection is programmed by the creator of the source
document. Overall, the Web contains a complex virtual web of
connections among a vast number of documents, graphics,
videos, and sounds.
Producing hypertext for the Web is accomplished by creating
documents with a language called HyperText Markup Language,
or HTML. With HTML, tags are placed within the text to
accomplish document formatting, visual features such as font
size, italics and bold, and the creation of hypertext links.
Graphics and multimedia may also be incorporated into an
HTML document. HTML is an evolving language, with new tags
being added as each upgrade of the language is developed and
released. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), led by Web
founder Tim Berners-Lee, coordinates the efforts of
standardizing HTML. The W3C now calls the language XHTML and
considers it to be an application of the XML language
standard.
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, Visual
Basic, Cold Fusion and XML are extending the capabilities of
the Web. A growing 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 development and flux.
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