What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW) can be described as: An Internet client-server hypertext distributed information retrieval system which originated at the CERN High-Energy Physics laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland. An extensive user community has developed on the Web since its public inception in 1991. In the early 1990s the developers at CERN spread word of the Web's capabilities to scientific audiences everywhere. This distributed hypermedia information system provides linking of information on the Net via hyperlinks within documents. It gives access to many types of files, such as text, sound, image, and movie, and provides an integrated interface to information accessed by various methods, such as gopher, ftp and telnet. On the WWW everything (a document, index or menu) is represented to the user as a hypertext object in HTML format. Hypertext links refer to other documents. These can refer to local or remote resources accessible via Gopher or News, as well as those available via the HTTP protocol used to transfer hypertext documents. The client program (known as a browser), e.g. Mosaic or Netscape, runs on the user's computer and provides two basic navigation operations: to follow a link or to send a query to a server. A variety of client and server software is freely available. Most clients and servers now also support "forms" which allow the user to enter arbitrary text as well as selecting options from customisable menus and on/off switches or "radio buttons". Taken from the Netskills Glossary.This course is based largely on using the WWW because of its ease of use, but you must remember that the Web is not the Internet, but a powerful and convenient way to navigate through the worldwide collection of networked computers that constitute the Internet using hypertext links. "Hypertext" is a term for a collection of documents containing cross-references or "links" which allow the reader to move easily from one document to another simply by clicking on a highlighted reference.
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