The World Wide Web
What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is most often called the Web.
- The Web is a network of computers all over the world.
- All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other.
- All the computers use a communication standard called HTTP.
How does the WWW work?
- Web information is stored in documents called Web pages.
- Web pages are files stored on computers called Web servers.
- Computers reading the Web pages are called Web clients.
- Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web browser.
- Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.
How does the browser fetch the pages?
- A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request.
- A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address.
- A page address looks like this: http://www.someone.com/page.htm.
How does the browser display the pages?
- All Web pages contain instructions on how to be displayed.
- The browser displays the page by reading these instructions.
- The most common display instructions are called HTML tags.
- HTML tags look like this <p>This is a Paragraph</p>.
Who is making the Web standards?
- The Web standards are not made up by Netscape or Microsoft.
- The rule-making body of the Web is the W3C.
- W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium.
- W3C puts together specifications for Web standards.
- The most essential Web standards are HTML, CSS and XML.
- The latest HTML standard is XHTML 1.1.