Short note on WWW

              The world wide web is known as WWW or W3 or Web. The world wide web is an architectural frame work for accessing linked documents and repository of information spread all over the Internet. The WWW has a unique combination of flexibility, portability and user-friendly features that distinguish it from other services provided by the Internet. The main reason for its popularity is the use of a concept called hypertext. Hypertext is a new way of information storage and retrieval, which enables authors to structure information in novel ways. An effectively designed hypertext document can help users rapidly locate the desired type of information from the vast amount of information on the Internet. Hypertext documents enable this by using a series of links. A link is a special type of item in a hypertext document, which connects the document to another document that provides more information about the linked item.

Hypertext documents on the Internet are known as Web pages. Web pages are created by using a special language called hypertext markup language (HTML). HTML is becoming a de-facto industrial standard for creating Web pages.

The WWW uses the client-server model, and an Internet protocol called hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) for interaction between the computers on the Internet. Any computer on the Internet, which uses the HTTP protocol is called a Web server and any computer, which can access that server is called a Web client.

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) – To access a webpage, one requires an address. For any data access distributed all over world, WWW uses the concept of locators. Any kind of information can be defined on the Internet using the standard URL. URL defines three things – method, host computer and pathname.

Method – It is the protocol used to retrieve the document. For example, Gopher, FTP, HTTP, news, TELNET, etc.

Host- It is the computer at which the information is available.

Path – It is the path name of the file where the information is located.