What is World Wide Web WWW or W3

World Wide Web

World Wide Web (also called WWW or W3) is a hypertext-based information system. It is the most important service provided by the internet.

  • It is an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. And it is a major means of access to the internet resources.
  • It was developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee, and he is called as the father of WWW.
  • Any word in a hypertext document can be specified as a pointer to a different hypertext document where more information pertaining to that word can be found.
  • The reader can open the second document by selecting the word; only the part of the linked document which contains relevant information will be displayed.
  • The second document may itself contain links to further documents. The reader need not know where the referenced documents are present.
  • The linked documents may be located at different Internet sites. WWW can handle different text formats and different methods of organizing information.
  • WWW is a graphical hypertext way of using the Internet using the HTTP protocol for transmitting Web pages and other information over the Internet.
  • The World Wide Web (W3) is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge.
  • It has a body of software and a set of protocols and conventions.

The three technologies which remain as foundation for today’s web. They are:

  • HTML
    • Hyper Text Markup Language.
    • The publishing format for the Web, including the ability to format documents and link to other documents and resources.
    • It is the standard markup language used to create web pages.
    • HTML describes the structure of a website semantically along with cues for presentation, making it a markup language rather than a programming language.
    • HTML elements form the building blocks of all websites. HTML allows images and objects to be embedded and can be used to create interactive forms.
  • URI (Uniform Resource Identifier)
    • It is a kind of “address” that is unique to each resource on the Web.
    • It is a string of characters used to identify a name of a resource.
    • Such identification enables interaction with representations of the resource over a network, typically the World Wide Web.
    • The URI syntax consists of a URI scheme name, such as http, ftp, etc. followed by a colon character and then by a scheme-specific part.
    • We can easily identify a resource with the help of URI in www.
  • HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)
    • It allows the retrieval of linked resources from across the Web.
    • HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990.
    • HTTP is the protocol to exchange or transfer hypertext.
    • The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.
    • It is a generic, stateless protocol which can be used for many tasks beyond hypertext, such as name servers and distributed object management systems.
    • A feature of HTTP is the typing and negotiation of data representation, allowing systems to be built independently of the data being transferred.

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