World wide Web
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 Locators (URLs, such as https://www.example.com/), which may be interlinked by hypertext, and are accessible over the Internet. The resources of the WWW may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser.
Information systems (IS) are formal, sociotechnical, organizational systems designed to collect, process, store, and distribute information. In a sociotechnical perspective, information systems are composed by four components: task, people, structure (or roles), and technology.
A web resource, or simply resource, is any identifiable thing, whether digital, physical, or abstract. Resources are identified using Uniform Resource Identifiers. In the Semantic Web, web resources and their semantic properties are described using the Resource Description Framework.
A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), although many people use the two terms interchangeably. URLs occur most commonly to reference web pages (http), but are also used for file transfer (ftp), email (mailto), database access (JDBC), and many other applications.
Most web browsers display the URL of a web page above the page in an address bar. A typical URL could have the form http://www.example.com/index.html, which indicates a protocol (http), a hostname (www.example.com), and a file name (index.html).
WorldWideWeb (later renamed to Nexus to avoid confusion between the software and the World Wide Web) was the first web browser[1] and editor. It was discontinued in 1994. At the time it was written, it was the sole web browser in existence, as well as the first WYSIWYG HTML editor. The source code was released into the public domain on April 30, 1993. Some of the code still resides on Tim Berners-Lee’s NeXT Computer in the CERN museum and has not been recovered due to the computer’s status as a historical artifact.[5] To coincide with the 20th anniversary of the research center giving the web to the world, a project began in 2013 at CERN to preserve this original hardware and software associated with the birth of the Web.
Hypertext is text displayed on a computer display or other electronic devices with references (hyperlinks) to other text that the reader can immediately access. Hypertext documents are interconnected by hyperlinks, which are typically activated by a mouse click, keypress set or by touching the screen. Apart from text, the term “hypertext” is also sometimes used to describe tables, images, and other presentational content formats with integrated hyperlinks. Hypertext is one of the key underlying concepts of the World Wide Web, where Web pages are often written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). As implemented on the Web, hypertext enables the easy-to-use publication of information over the Internet.
The Internet (portmanteau of interconnected network) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
Application software (app for short) is a program or group of programs designed for end users. Examples of an application include a word processor, a spreadsheet, an accounting application, a web browser, an email client, a media player, a file viewer, an aeronautical flight simulator, a console game or a photo editor. The collective noun application software refers to all applications collectively.[1] This contrasts with system software, which is mainly involved with running the computer. Applications may be bundled with the computer and its system software or published separately, and may be coded as proprietary, open-source or university projects.[2] Apps built for mobile platforms are called mobile apps.
A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser) is a software application for accessing information on the World Wide Web. When a user requests a particular website, the web browser retrieves the necessary content from a web server and then displays the resulting web page on the user’s device. A web browser is not the same thing as a search engine, though the two are often confused.[1][2] For a user, a search engine is just a website, such as Google Search, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, that stores searchable data about other websites. However, to connect to a website’s server and display its web pages, a user must have a web browser installed. As of March 2019, more than 4.3 billion people use a browser, which is about 55% of the world’s population. The three most popular browsers are Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
English scientist Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN in 1991, first to other research institutions starting in January 1991 and then to the general public in August 1991. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet.
The Information Age
The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a historic period beginning in the 20th century and characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization to an economy primarily based upon information technology. The onset of the Information Age can be associated with the development of transistor technology,[4] particularly the MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor), which revolutionized modern technology and became the fundamental building block of digital electronics in the information age.
According to the United Nations Public Administration Network, the Information Age formed by capitalizing on computer microminiaturization advances. This usage of computing technology within the wider society has led to modernized information and communication processes becoming the driving force of social evolution.
Web resources may be any type of downloaded media, but web pages are hypertext media that have been formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Such formatting allows for embedded hyperlinks that contain URLs and permit users to navigate to other web resources. In addition to text, web pages may contain references to images, video, audio, and software components which are displayed in the user’s web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content.
Multiple web resources with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, make up a website. Websites are stored in computers that are running a program called a web server that responds to requests made over the Internet from web browsers running on a user’s computer. Website content can be largely provided by a publisher, or interactively where users contribute content or the content depends upon the users or their actions. Websites may be provided for myriad informative, entertainment, commercial, governmental, or non-governmental reasons.
How Big is World Wide Web
The size of the World Wide Web (The Internet) The Indexed Web contains at least 6.46 billion pages (Monday, 16 December, 2019). For more information please refer https://www.worldwidewebsize.com/. The Internet is a global network of networks while the Web, also referred formally as World Wide Web (www) is collection of information which is accessed via the Internet. Another way to look at this difference is; the Internet is infrastructure while the Web is service on top of that infrastructure.
Who Owns the Internet
According to the (ICANN), No one person, company, organization or government runs the Internet. It is a globally distributed computer network comprised of many voluntarily interconnected autonomous networks. ICANN helps coordinate the Domain Name System (DNS), often referred to as “the phone book of the Internet” because it matches domain names with appropriate IP address numbers. ICANN also operates part of the DNS, and manages IP addresses and other protocol numbers.