World Wide Web (WWW)
The World Wide Web is a vast information system operating on the internet, organized in the form of hypertext documents. Hypertext allows for the integration of documents through links. These links enable users to move easily and quickly from one document to another. A good example of this is when you click on a link to get more information about a term or topic you encounter on a web page, directing you to another related page.
The invention of the World Wide Web in 1989 was a revolutionary development by British scientist Tim Berners-Lee. At the time, Berners-Lee was a computer engineer working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The main goal of the invention was to facilitate automatic information sharing among scientists worldwide, allowing them to easily share the data and results of their experiments and studies.
CERN is an international research community where over 1700 scientists from more than 100 countries come together. These scientists spend part of their time at CERN and the rest at universities and national laboratories in their home countries. Therefore, they needed reliable communication tools for exchanging information.
At that time, the internet and hypertext technologies existed, but no one had taken concrete steps on how to use the internet to link or share documents. Tim Berners-Lee focused on three main technologies that would allow computers to understand each other: HTML (HyperText Markup Language), URL (Uniform Resource Locator), and HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). Thus, the fundamental objective behind the invention of the World Wide Web was to combine existing computer technologies, data networks, and hypertext into a user-friendly and effective global information system.
Internet vs Web
Internet and World Wide Web (Web) are often confused with each other, but they are actually distinct concepts. Understanding the differences between these two terms helps us comprehend how they work together and complement each other.
The Internet is a massive network connecting millions of computers worldwide. This network began in the late 1960s with the U.S. Department of Defense’s ARPANET project, formed by connecting different computer networks. The Internet supports various services and protocols such as email, file transfers, instant messaging, and online gaming. Thus, the Internet is an infrastructure that includes a range of services and protocols running on it.
On the other hand, the World Wide Web or simply the Web, is an information sharing system that operates on the Internet and uses hypertext documents to present information. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the Web allows users to access web pages created in HTML. These pages are connected via URLs and transmitted over the HTTP protocol. The Web offers a rich and interactive experience that enables users to access various media types such as text, images, and videos.
In short, the Internet is a broad network connecting different computers, while the Web is a service running on that network, facilitating users’ access to information. The Web is just one of the many services provided by the Internet, but it is so widely used today that it is sometimes perceived as synonymous with the Internet. However, technically, the Internet represents the infrastructure, and the Web represents one of the applications running on that infrastructure.