What is WWW?

WWW consists of billions of web pages of accessible computer information with or without hyperlinks contained in websites with domain names and hosted by computer web servers. Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Information Education: How computer devices work with the internet

You use your phone and personal computers to access the internet on a daily basis, perhaps – checking your Facebook, Twitter account, and interacting within other multi-social media platforms, chatting and exchanging texts, video, and audio clips, but perhaps, don’t know how your phone works with the internet.

Phones work with the internet through the exchange of computer information with the Internet facilitated through the World Wide Web (WWW).

What is WWW or W3 or Web? What are the features of W3? What are the uses and benefits? What are the disadvantages?

World Wide Web (www) is a household name in computer internet technology

Many people especially students including school children and IT novices attach the meaning of ‘www.’ to a particular website or web address. In fact, ‘www.’ is seen as a household name in computer internet technology that some people would actually consider a website or web address incorrect without the initial ‘www.’

WATCH VIDEO OF THE MEANING OF WWW?

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What is the meaning of the World Wide Web (WWW) or W3 or the Web?

What really is the meaning of the World Wide Web (www) or the Web and what are the feature or characteristics of the World Wide Web (www)? The meaning or definition of ‘www’ is not far from the words that constitute the name.

To school children or secondary school student, WWW or W3 or the Web is a huge worldwide warehouse that stores computer information. The retrievable and accessible computer information is stored in this massive storehouse for exchange.WWW consists of billions of web pages with or without hyperlinks contained in websites and hosted by web servers

A simple definition of the World Wide Web is a massive collection of interactive multimedia resources whose information is exchanged between the computers on the Internet. The WWW is a sub-network and is the fastest-growing part of the Internet.

A broader definition states that the World Wide Web (WWW) is the world of network-accessible computer internet information as an epitome of human knowledge. A more technical definition of the World Wide Web (WWW) is all the resources and users on the Internet that are using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This broader definition comes from the organization that Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee helped found, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

How does WWW work?

Based on the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), WWW uses hypertext mark-up language (HTML) to create web pages that can be easily navigated through numerous hypertext links contained within them. Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) is a characteristic feature of WWW. In other terms, The World Wide Web works by exchanging information between computers on the Internet, tying them together into a vast collection of interactive multimedia resources.

Evolution of the World Wide Web

The WWW is a sub-network which was developed at CERN in Switzerland and is the fastest-growing part of the Internet. is traced to Timothy Berners Lee. The evolution of the World Wide Web came into existence as a proposal by him – Timothy Berners Lee, in 1989 at CERN Geneva, Switzerland (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics) to allow researchers to work together effectively and efficiently at CERN. It finally evolved into the World Wide Web. Ever since its evolvement, WWW or the Web has transitioned from Web 1.0 to Web 3.0

WATCH VIDEO OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WWW, WEBSITE, WEB PAGE, URL, DOMAIN NAME, AND WEBSITE HOSTING

Terms used to describe WWW 

1. Webserver

A web server is a computer that stores web information. Web servers are powerful computers capable of handling tons of website visitors seeking information at a time. So, principally, web servers store a collection of web pages on a website. Each server hosts one or more websites and each of these sites can contain millions of web pages.

A web browser selects and displays an initial homepage of a website based on how it is designed.

2. Web browser

A web browser is a computer software program that enables us to view and explore information on the web. It is through a web browser that computer information on a web page of a website can be accessed.

Web browsing or surfing is the method of navigating through pages of information.

Web browser software is built on the concept of hyperlinks, which allow users to switch web pages. They can display the graphics of a web page or document; download and transfer files from web pages, play audio and video files on a web page and provide access to newsgroups.

Web browsers have features like extensions and add-ons which are software for browsing assistance; browsing history for a revisit of previous websites or webpages; bookmark for storing favourite websites or web pages for URL referencing;  suggested web sites; browser management tools for adjustments and settings, and others.

Some examples of common web browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, Opera Mini, and UC Browser.

3. Website

A website is a characteristic of WWW that has a collection of created web pages. A website, which is hosted in a web server, can contain millions of web pages. A website can be owned by an individual, school, government agency, organizations, businesses and companies, certain groups and trade unions, etc.

A website usually has a home page.  A home page is the starting page or the initial page of a website that provides information about the purpose and contents of the website. What a home page is to a website is similar to what a table of content or book cover is to a book. A Homepage can be designed by a web developer to display areas of interest to a website owner.

Most websites are freely available for access by anyone but a few websites or web pages of a website, such as in e-commerce, classified documents, and others, require a password or a paid subscription to access the content.

4. Web page

A web page is a document on a website displayed by a browser. Web pages can include accessible texts, images, sounds, videos on websites. The computer information on the Web is made available for access through the web pages.

5. Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is a feature of the WWW that enables us to type in a web page or site address for display. Each web page has a unique address for location and the display of its content is entered in the URL and accessed.

6. Hyperlinks (Links)

Hyperlinks (otherwise referred to as links), as a feature of www, are in form of highlighted texts or images on a web page that connects a user to other web pages on a website or websites directly on the web when clicked on. Hyperlinks can connect or navigate webpages within the same website or different websites on any computer provided the computer is connected to the internet.

Search Engines

What is a search engine?

A search engine is a software accessed on the Computer Internet that searches a database of information according to the user’s query. The search engine provides a list of results that best match the user’s query.

A search engine is a web service that helps you find other web pages. Today, there are many different search engines available on the Internet, each with their own abilities and features. The most popular and well-known search engine is Google. Other search engines include Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, AOL, Baidu, or DuckDuckGo. Search engines are normally accessed through a web browser (e.g. you can perform search engine searches directly in the address bar of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc.) or through a web page (e.g. bing.com or duckduckgo.com).

How does a search engine work?

A web crawler or spider remains the source of all search engine data which automatically visits web pages and indexes their contents once they appear online. Once a page has been crawled, the data contained in the page is processed and indexed. The indexed data processed then gets broken up and moved to other computer files, and/or parts of device memory and provide a ranking mechanism of the website. Through ranking, it provides the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher’s query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.

Since large search engines contain millions and sometimes billions of web pages, many search engines not only search the web pages but also display the results depending on their importance usually determined by using various algorithms.

Website hosting

Website hosting is the process of renting or buying a website space on the World Wide Web. Web hosting is a service that allows organizations and individuals to post a website or web page onto the Internet. Website content such as HTML, CSS, and images has to be housed on a server to be viewable online (website hosting service provider).

Websites are hosted or stored, on special computers called servers. A computer web server can connect every website to each other. So, web hosting service providers have web servers, connectivity, and associated services to host websites. By offering a variety of hosting plans, they cover the range of hosting needs, from small blogs and large organizations.

A web host, or web hosting service provider, is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website or webpage to be viewed on the Internet.

7 Features of the World Wide Web (www) or the Web

7 major features of the World Wide Web (www) or the Web are discussed in this article. These features of WWW describe the key characteristics upon which ‘www’ is structured. One can similarly relate the features of ‘www’ to the characteristics.

1. It has of HyperText Information System

2. It has a cross-platform

3. It is widely distributed

4. It has open standards and open source, such as TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML, CSS, Apache HTTP Server, Mosaic, Netscape, Firefox, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, etc.

5. It has a web browser. Its web browser provides a single interface to many services – banking, molecular biology, information search, and retrieval, etc.

6. WWW is dynamic, interactive, evolving.

7. WWW has a “Web 2.0” experience: Web 2.0 applies to collective intelligence; data and rich user experience.

Uses of WWW

Businesses, firms, companies, organizations, and individuals promote online products and services via gaining instant global access to millions of people and such underscore the business uses of the WWW. Here is a look at the various business uses of the Web.

1. Communication

Electronic mail (e-mail) communication service is a feature of the Internet used most expansively by businesses for communication. Digital equipment, a qualification of the strength of the Internet e-mail service has millions of computers linked to the internet sharing tens of millions of messages each month with people external to the company.

2. Collaboration

Companies and businesses find it much easier to engage in effective communication and collaboration through effective links between companies. One notable example is the collaboration between big information technology (IT) companies who use Internet links to share a workstation.

WWW has become an indispensable tool for today’s businesses and that companies which do not expand in this direction will be left by the side of the information superhighway characterized by a global computer network.

3. Publicity, marketing, and advertising

Businesses of today are extensively gaining instant access to millions of people all over the globe and promoting, advertising, and marketing of their products to the public through setting up WWW. You can’t imagine the volume of ads displayed on the web pages of numerous websites.

4. Research and Development

Businesses, companies, organizations, institutions, and individuals, especially those involved in research and development, nowadays, use the Internet as an additional resource for collecting information. The use of WWW in businesses explains how one can possibly post a query on a bulletin board or join a discussion group and receive advice on how to solve the problem. On the other hand, there are millions of web pages, some of which contain access to searchable databases of information relating to particular subjects.

5. Direct online selling

Businesses and individuals use ‘virtual markets and shopping malls’, and even other outlets browse through catalogs and examine various products in vast detail direct sale of online products, all courtesy of the Web. This has all been made possible by the multi-media capabilities that the WWW offers.

Disadvantages of WWW

Everything that has an advantage has a disadvantage. Several disadvantages of the WWW abounds. One major disadvantage of WWW is internet insecurity. Another is overload and excess information which with other factors like a large number of users per host community, contributes the slow usage or searches. Others are search strategy inefficiency, cybercrimes, cyberbullying, identity theft, undeserving malware, poor data, and information usage, and control, among others.

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