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Getting Started

World Wide Web​

The World Wide Web—commonly referred to as WWW, W3, or the Web—is a system of interconnected public webpages accessible through the Internet. The Web is not the same as the Internet: the Web is one of many applications built on top of the Internet.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the architecture of what became known as the World Wide Web.

The system we know today as "the Web" consists of several components:

  • The HTTP protocol governs data transfer between a server and a client.
  • To access a Web component, a client supplies a unique universal identifier, called a URL (uniform resource locator) or URI (uniform resource identifier) (formally called Universal Document Identifier (UDI)).
  • HTML (hypertext markup language) is the most common format for publishing web documents.

How people access the Web​

Browsers - People access websites using software called a web browser.

Popular examples include: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Edge (Internet Explorer).

In order to view a web page, users might type a web address into their browser, follow a link from another site, or use a bookmark.

Devices - People are accessing websites on an increasing range of devices including desktop computers, laptops, smartphones, tablets, and smart tv.

It is important to remember that various devices have different screen sizes and have faster connections to web than others.

Web Servers - When you ask your browser for a web page, the request is sent across the Internet to a special computer known as a web server which hosts the websites.

Web servers are special computers that are constantly connected to the Internet, and are optimized to send web pages out to people who request them.

Domain Name System (DNS) server​

DNS, or the Domain Name System, translates human readable domain names (for example, www.google.com) to machine readable IP addresses (for example, 142.251.220.164).