What is the World Wide Web and what makes it work?

What is the World Wide Web and what makes it work?

The WWW incorporates all of the Internet services above and much more. You can retrieve documents, view images, animation, and video, listen to sound files, speak and hear voice, and view programs that run on practically any software in the world, providing your computer has the hardware and software to do these things.

When you log onto the Internet using a web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera, Safari), you are viewing documents on the World Wide Web. The basic foundation on which the WWW functions is the programming language called HTML. It is HTML and other programming imbedded within HTML that make possible hypertext. Hypertext is the ability to have web pages containing links, which are areas in a page or buttons or graphics on which you can click your mouse button to retrieve another document into your computer. This "clickability" using Hypertext links is the feature which is unique and revolutionary about the Web.

How do hypertext links work? Every document or file or site or movie or soundfile or anything you find on the Web has a unique URL (uniform resource locator) that identifies what computer the thing is on, where it is within that computer, and its specific file name. (More explanation on the structure of URLs.) Every Hypertext link on every web page in the world contains one of the URLs. When you click on a link of any kind on a Web page, you send a request to retrieve the unique document on some computer in the world that is uniquely identified by that URL. URLs are like addresses of web pages. A whole cluster of internationally accepted standards (such as TCP/IP and HTML) make possible this global information retrieval phenomenon that transcends all political and language boundaries.