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World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web (WWW) is a system of linked hypertext documents and other media that are connected through the Internet.

  • often referred to as the same as the Internet
    • but they are not the same
    • internet is the infrastructure, whereas the web resides on the infrastructure
  • composed of:
    • a hypertext document format for embedding hyperlinks to other documents
    • a protocol for transferring hypertext over the network
    • and a server process that supplies hypertext pages upon request

How it works

  • Software packages that allow users to access hypertext are either browsers or web servers
    • A browser resides on the user’s machine to obtain the requested materials and present them to the end user in an organized way
    • The web server resides on the computer containing the hypertext documents
  • HTTP protocol or similar protocols are used to transfer data between web servers and browsers.

Each hypertext document available through the World Wide Web is given a unique address called a uniform resource locator (URL).

  • includes the protocol, domain, and all subdomains, as well as the resource path ID and name of the document.

Structure of a URL

URL: http://subdomain.domain.top-level-domain/directory-path/document_name.html

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is a way of encoding a document.

  • Special symbols called tags describe how the document should appear on a display screen, what multimedia resources (audio, video, images) should accompany the document, and which elements within the document are linked to other documents
  • focuses on appearance

Extensible markup language (XML) provides a standardized style for designing notational systems for representing data as text files.

  • generalized language
  • emphasizes semantics

Graph View

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