World Wide Web
Your ultimate guide to the most awesome thing on the Internet!
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Welcome to the Web!
The (also known as WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists.
It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system".
History of the Web 
The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN. He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as distributing them to collaborators outside CERN.
The historic World Wide Web logo, designed by Robert Cailliau. Currently, there is no widely accepted logo in use for the WWW.
CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free on 30 April 1993, enabling its widespread use!
After the NCSA released the Mosaic web browser later that year, the Web's popularity grew rapidly as thousands of websites sprang up in less than a year. Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server.
More historical details coming soon! Check back later!
How it Works, Dude!
The World Wide Web functions as an application layer protocol that is run "on top of" (figuratively) the Internet, helping it to make it more functional. The advent of the Mosaic web browser helped to make the web much more usable, including the display of images and moving images (GIFs).
Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource.
The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL http://example.org/home.html.
GET /home.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
And the server responds with:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Followed by the content of the requested page.
HTML: The Building Blocks!
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications.
HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page.
HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript, which affects the behaviour and content of web pages.
Detailed explanation of HTML tags coming soon!
Linking It All Together!
Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions, and other web resources.
In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this:
<a href="http://example.org/home.html">Example.org Homepage</a>
Such a collection of useful, related resources interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a .
What's a Web Page?
A web page (also written as webpage) is a document that is suitable for the World Wide Web and web browsers. A web browser displays a web page on a monitor or mobile device.
The term web page usually refers to what is visible, but may also refer to the contents of the computer file itself, which is usually a text file containing hypertext written in HTML or a comparable markup language.
Typical web pages provide hypertext for browsing to other web pages via hyperlinks, often referred to as links.
A static web page is delivered exactly as stored, as web content in the web server's file system.
In contrast, a dynamic web page is generated by a web application, usually driven by server-side software. Dynamic web pages are used when each user may require completely different information, for example, bank websites, web email, etc.
The Whole Shebang: A Website!
A website is a collection of related web resources including web pages, multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server.
Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can be a personal website, a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organisation website, etc.
All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically a part of an intranet.
Your Window to the Web: The Browser!
A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software user agent for accessing information on the World Wide Web.
To connect to a website's server and display its pages, a user needs to have a web browser program. This is the program that the user runs to download, format, and display a web page on the user's computer.
The most popular browsers are Chrome, Safari, Edge, Samsung Internet and Firefox.
The Brains of the Operation: The Server!
A Web server is server software, or hardware dedicated to running said software, that can satisfy World Wide Web client requests. A web server can, in general, contain one or more websites.
The primary function of a web server is to store, process and deliver web pages to clients.
Many generic web servers also support scripting using Active Server Pages (ASP), PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor), or other scripting languages. This means that the behaviour of the web server can be scripted in separate files, while the actual server software remains unchanged.
Little Bits of Data: Cookies!
An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is browsing.
Cookies were designed to be a reliable mechanism for websites to remember stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) or to record the user's browsing activity.
Cookies perform essential functions in the modern web. Perhaps most importantly, authentication cookies are the most common method used by web servers to know whether the user is logged in or not.
Be aware of your privacy when using cookies!
Finding Stuff: Search Engines!
A web search engine or Internet search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web search (Internet search), which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a web search query.
In 1990, Archie, the world's first search engine, was released. This early search tool was superseded by more advanced engines like Yahoo! in 1995 and Google in 1998.
The deep web, invisible web, or hidden web are parts of the World Wide Web whose contents are not indexed by standard web search engines.
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About This Site
This site is dedicated to the amazing World Wide Web. Created with love and lots of animated GIFs!