WWW Primer - The World Wide Web

WWW - The World Wide Web

WWW is most often called the Web.

The Web is a network of computers all over the world.

The computers on the Web communicate using standard languages.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) makes the Web standards.

What is the WWW?

WWW stands for the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is most often called the Web

The Web is a network of computers all over the world

All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other

All the computers use a communication standard called HTTP

How Does the WWW Work?

Information is stored in documents called Web pages

Web pages are files stored on computers called Web servers

Computers reading the Web pages are called Web clients

Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web browser

Popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox

How Does the Browser Fetch the Pages?

A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request

A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address

A page address looks like: http://www.someone.com/page.htm

How Does the Browser Display the Pages?

All Web pages contain instructions on how to be displayed

The browser displays the page by reading these instructions


The most common display instructions are called HTML tags

The HTML tag for a paragraph looks like this: <p>

A paragraph in HTML is defined like this: <p>This is a paragraph.</p>

Who is Making the Web Standards?

The Web standards are not made up by Google or Microsoft

The rule-making body of the Web is the W3C

W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium

W3C puts together specifications for Web standards

The most essential Web standards are HTML, CSS and XML