The World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web (WWW)

The World Wide Web — often called the web — is a vast ocean of information stored as trillions of interlinked web pages and other resources. These resources can be shared or accessed through the Internet. Before the web, if you wanted to access files on different computers, you had to log in to each computer separately over the Internet. Worse, those files were often in different formats, making it hard for one computer to understand another's documents.

In 1990, British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web by defining three fundamental technologies that made the web possible.

The Three Core Technologies of the Web

1. HTML — HyperText Markup Language

HTML is the language used to design standardised web pages. Because pages are written in HTML, web content can be read and understood from any computer anywhere in the world. HTML uses tags to tell a web browser how the content on a page should be displayed. Every web page's basic structure is built using HTML.

2. URI — Uniform Resource Identifier

A URI is a unique identifier for a resource located on the web. It can identify a resource (hardware or software) either by its location, or by its name, or by both. The most common type of URI is a URL — Uniform Resource Locator. A URL gives both the location of a resource and the mechanism (protocol) needed to access it. A URL is sometimes called a web address, but it is more than just a domain name — it contains other information that completes the address.

For example, in the URL http://www.ncert.nic.in/textbook/textbook.htm:

• http is the protocol name (other protocols include https, ftp, telnet)
• www is a subdomain
• ncert.nic.in is the domain name

Examples of URIs that use location (i.e., URLs) include:

• https://www.mhrd.gov.in
• http://www.ncert.nic.in
• http://www.airindia.in

3. HTTP — HyperText Transfer Protocol

HTTP is a set of rules used to retrieve linked web pages across the web. Its more secure and advanced version is HTTPS.

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