The World Wide Web—An Overview

Most of us are accustomed to using the the World Wide Web every day, whether it is to read email or to find information. It is so familiar to us that we just refer to it as the Web. But what is the Web? How do we get it? How do we use it? And how does it Work?

What it Is

We know intuitively what the Web is from using it. It is an interconnected set of resources, usually in the form of Web pages, that we access with a computer. Nearly every page we view has links to other pages. A visualization of the Web could indeed look like a spider's web, in which the places where the strands connect are pages, and the strands from one connection point to another are hyperlinks—Universal Resource Locater (URL) addresses embeded in the pages. Essentially, every public Web page in the world is connected to every other Web page, directly or indirectly through other pages, by hyperlink connections embedded in various pages along the way.

How We Get It

To "get" the Web we need:

• A computer (a broad term that now includes desktop computers, laptops, iPads, tablets, and smart phones).
• A browser program (Google Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, as examples).
• A network interface card (NIC), which is a special circuit in the computer that can provide a connection to the Internet.
• An account with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) that allows us to connect to the Internet through the NIC either wirelessly via radio signals or through a connection that we plug into our computer (the ISP provides a gateway connectiont to the Web).

How We Use It

We use the Web in two major ways.

1. To view and use Web pages or download a resource, we type a URL (Universal Resource Locater) address, such as http://www.montana.edu, into the address field of the browser and click "return." Or, which really is the same thing, we click on a bookmark we have previously saved, such as Montana State University, and associated bookmared URL (in this case http://www.montana.edu) is automatically entered into the address field of the browser for us. In either case, the requested page is returned from its source and displayed by the browser on our computer.
   
   
2. We type a request into the search field of the browser, such as Spinning Webs, and the browser creates a URL that, in Chrome, looks like the following (split into three lines for readability):
   
             https://www.google.com/search?
                          q=Spinning+Webs&oq=Spinning+Webs&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61l3j0l2.
                          6869j0j4&sourceid=chrome&espv=210&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8
   
   In this example the browser sends this entire string to www.google.com/search where Google's search programs take over, examine the rest of the string to see what the search is about, and construct and return a Web page to our computer with results that attempt to answer the request.

How it Works

How it works is what we will cover in the rest of this topic, Web Workings. As we are beginning to see, there are many pieces to the Web. In particular, we refer to the connection that we use when browsing the Web as the Internet connection. The Web and the Internet are not the same things. Wewill  understand this once we have finished with this topic.