The World Wide Web

An Internet facility that links documents locally and remotely. The Web document, or Web page, contains text, graphics, animations and videos as well as hypertext links. The links in the page let users jump from page to page (hypertext) whether the pages are stored on the same server or on servers around the world. Web pages are accessed and read via a Web browser, the two most popular being Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup. There is a potential large benefit from the integration of a variety of systems in a way which allows a user to follow links pointing from one piece of information to another one.

The World Wide Web largely realized the dreams of Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Marshall McLuhan, Ted Nelson, and others for the potential uses of information technology, providing an easy way to share huge amounts of information. The web was also the key technology that popularized the Internet around the world.

In the last half of the 1990s, the Web became "the" center of Internet activity, because the Web browser provided an easy, point and click interface to the largest collection of online information in the world. Ever since the Web became the focal point of the Internet, the amount of information has increased at a staggering rate.

The Web has also turned into an online shopping mall as almost every organization has added e-commerce capabilities. In addition, the Web has become a multimedia delivery system as new browser features and plug-in extensions allow for audio, video, telephony, 3-D animations and videoconferencing. Most browsers also support the Java language, which allows applications to be downloaded from the Net and run locally.

The fundamental Web format is a text document embedded with HTML tags that provide the formatting of the page as well as the hypertext links to other pages (URLs). HTML codes are common alphanumeric characters that can be typed with any text editor or word processor. Numerous Web publishing programs provide a graphical interface for Web page creation and automatically generate the codes. Many word processors and publishing programs also export their documents to HTML, thus Web pages can be created by users without learning any coding system. The ease of page creation has helped fuel the Web's growth.

Web pages are maintained at Web sites, which are computers that support the Web's HTTP protocol. When you access a Web site, you generally first link to its home page, which is an HTML document that serves as an index, or springboard, to the site's contents. Large organizations create and manage their own Web sites. Smaller ones have their sites hosted on servers run by their Internet service providers (ISPs). Countless individuals have developed personal Web home pages as many ISPs include this service with their monthly access charge. Individuals can post their resumes, hobbies and whatever else they want as a way of introducing themselves to the world at large.

The Web spawned the intranet, an inhouse, private Web site for internal users. It is protected from the Internet via a firewall that lets intranet users out to the Internet, but prevents Internet users from coming in.

Where It Came From & Where It's Going

The World Wide Web was developed at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva from a proposal by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. It was created to share research information on nuclear physics. In 1991, the first command line browser was introduced. By the start of 1993, there were 50 Web servers, and the Voila X Window browser provided the first graphical capability for the Web. In that same year, CERN introduced its Macintosh browser, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Chicago introduced the X Window version of Mosaic. Mosaic was developed by Marc Andreessen who later became world famous as a principal at Netscape.

By 1994, there were approximately 500 Web sites, and, by the start of 1995, nearly 10,000. In 1995, more articles were written about the Web than any other subject in the computer field. Today, there are more than six million Web sites with new ones coming online at an extraordinary rate.

Many believe the Web signifies the beginning of the real information age and envision it as the business model of the 21st Century. Others consider it the "World Wide Wait" as surfing the Net via modem using an ISP scrambling to keep up with demand is often an exercise in extreme patience.

It seems that everyone has some vested interest in the Web. The telephone and cable companies want to give you high-speed access to it, while the existing ISPs want to gain market share. IS managers are concerned with intranet vulnerability when connected to the Internet. The publishing industry is perplexed over how to manage its copyrighted material on a medium that can send it all over the world in a few seconds. Software vendors are scrambling to make their products more Web compatible every day. Hardware vendors are debating whether the network computers (NCs) and handheld Internet devices will eventually replace the desktop PC.

Nothing in the computer/communications field has ever come onto the scene with such intensity. Is it really the marketplace of the 21st Century? Stay tuned! It will be more than interesting.

World Wide Web Linking-Accessing a Web document requires typing in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address of the home page in your Web browser. The home page contains hypertext links to other documents that can be stored on the same server or on a server anywhere in the world.

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