3. WWW and the Net

I confess that, like a lot of people, I've used the terms Internet and World Wide Web in the wrong context. The Internet is the infrastructure, which allows computers to communicate with each other while the World Wide Web is a system of hyperlinked documents or hypertext that is accessed through the Internet.

^{How the World Wide Web works ©CERN}

The Internet was based on an information sharing system designed by the US military (DARPA) in the 1960s while the Web was developed by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in the early 1990s.

Each computer on the Net has a unique identification number. This is done through the Internet Protocol (IP). You can find your IP number here. The IP address is translated into a domain name to make it easier to recognise. The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) enables us to find documents and files on the internet. The format is: protocol://servername/local file path. For example, my website URL is http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abhp645/. The CERN website explains how the Web works.

This system was developed in the 1990s by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who in October 2009 admitted the format didn't really need the two slashes // (see Daily Telegraph article).

When creating a webpage, you can use marked up text. Markups can represent the style and structure of the webpage. W3Schools website provides an easy to follow tutorial on html.

Here's a link to my website. I added hyperlinks to connect from one document to the main page. This links to the html exercise that I produced. If you view the page source, you will see the html markup. I used the University's Unix system to publish the document onto the Web so that it is now visible to a global audience.