Full-stack Web development Bootcamp

What is internet and World wide web(www)? | Module: 1

Definition: The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use
the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide.
 There are about 45 billion devices on the internet.

 

Internet Protocol Suite

The Internet protocol suite is used for relaying data(text, video, audio, image, etc) across network boundaries. Below are the most important protocols.


• SMTP: This is used to send and receive emails. All our email servers (like Gmail, Yahoo mail, etc) use this protocol.
• SSH: This protocol is used to securely log in to the remote application.
• HTTP: World Wide Web (WWW) is based on this protocol. This gives us the interconnected web pages which form the basis of the WWW.
• XMPP: WhatsApp (Instant messaging) and other messaging apps use this to
• Others.

So as we can see the internet is a much bigger entity than WWW, which is just one protocol to use it. The below diagram clearly shows the different components of the Internet Protocol.

credit: minitool.com

World wide web

Talking specifically about World wide web (WWW) It operates on the HTTP (Hypertext transfer protocol). This protocol was invented by Tim Berner's lee in 1989 while working at CERN. HTTP works on the client-server model. The client (in most cases it's the browser like Chrome /Firefox/etc) sends the request and the server sends back the response.  A simple diagram can be seen below.

To understand WWW further imagine you being able to access documents on millions of computers(servers) like locally every file has a location of your computer C:\My Documents\file.txt.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locator 
eg: https://www.google.org/assets/static/images/logo_googledotorg-171e7482e5523603fc0eed236dd772d8.svg  

The resources of the Web are transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser, and are published by a software application called a web server.

Webpage

What we see on websites are web pages that are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to text, there can also contain images, audio, videos. Each webpage has a unique address called URL: Like google.com, twitter.com, etc

Hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. There are around 45 billion web pages indexed by Google, so in a way have access to these 45 billion documents.

So this is the Internet and WWW in a nutshell. You can watch the below video to know more.

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