Understanding the World Wide Web

This tutorial covers the basics of the World Wide Web, focusing on its technical aspects. After all, the Web is a technological phenomenon. Therefore it's useful to understand some of the fundamentals of how it works.
The world wide web is a system of Internet servers that supports hypertext and multimedia to access several Internet protocols on a single interface. The World Wide Web is often abbreviated as the web or www.
The World Wide Web was developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee of the European Particle Physics Lab (CERN) in Switzerland. The initial purpose of the Web was to use networked hypertext to facilitate communication among its members, who were located in several countries. Word was soon spread beyond CERN, and a rapid growth in the number of both developers and users ensued. In addition to hypertext, the Web began to incorporate graphics, video, and sound. The use of the Web has reached global proportions and has become a defining element of human culture in an amazingly short period of time.
In order for the Web to be accessible to anyone, certain agreed-upon standards must be followed in the creation and delivery of its content. An organization leading the efforts to standardize the Web is the World Wide Web (W3C) Consortium. Take a look at the W3C Consortium Web site to get an idea of its activities. A lot of the material is technical because, after all, the Web is a technical phenomenon.

Protocols of the Web

The surface simplicity of the Web comes from the fact that many individual protocols can be contained within a single Web site. internet protocols are sets of rules that allow for intermachine communication on the Internet. These are a few of the protocols you can experience on the Web:
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol): transmits hyptertext over networks. This is the protocol of the Web.

E-mail (Simple Mail Transport Protocol or SMTP): distributes e-mail messages and attached files to one or more electronic mailboxes.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol): transfers files between an FTP server and a computer, for example, to download software.

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol): allows delivery of voice communications over IP networks, for example, phone calls.

The Web provides a single, graphical interface for accessing these and other protocols. This creates a convenient and user-friendly environment. Once upon a time, it was necessary to know how to use protocols within separate, command-level environments. This meant you needed to know the text commands and type them out to make things happen. The Web is much easier, since it gathers these protocols together into a unified graphical system. Because of this feature, and because of the Web's ability to work with multimedia and advanced programming languages, the Web is by far the most popular component of the Internet.

Hypertext and links: the motion of the Web

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 created by the author of the source document. Overall, the Web contains a complex virtual web of connections among a vast number of documents, images, 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.

<p> This is a paragraph that shows the underlying HTML code. <strong>This sentence is rendered in bold text</strong>. <em>This sentence is rendered in italic text.</em> </p>