Lecture two: The internet and the world wide web

Admittedly before this lecture I thought the internet and the world wide web were the same thing and I believe this to be a common fallacy. The fact that these two entities are actually very different was made clear by the analogy of the internet as a road system and the world wide web as a car traveling on it, I also like the idea as the internet as a library and the world wide web as the books, but the first is probably clearer! Essentially the internet is the communication network used for transmitting, and the world wide web is the information that is being transmitted.

The internet, which was established in the 1960s by the American military, is away of allowing computers to share information irrespective of their location. It works as a network of networks, many nodes joined together, changing the ways in which we are able to share knowledge and communicate.

The world wide web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s, what started as a hypertext project in order to share information efficiently with his disparately located colleagues at CERN, evolved into the web we know today. The web is the information, the web pages of text, photos and videos that we share globally.

Hypertext is a digital language that allows links within and between documents, relating more closely to the human thought process than a linear document. The model of Wikipedia is a perfect example, users can be reading one article and take various tangents by clicking on words they are interested in, that are hyperlinks, taking them to a separate  hypertext document, and the process goes on.

Hypertext Mark-up language or HTML is a data mark up language that allows hypertext to work worldwide. It is a series of commands that explain to a browser how to interpret the information it surrounds, by having one uniform way of doing this Berners-Lee eliminated the problem of world wide compatibility. Each document is given a unique address or URL that acts as a location, the place where a browser will find that page, the uniform format of the address is the key to their being one global network rather than numerous fractal groups. HTML can be used to embed links to other URLs within a document, making it possible for any information on the internet to be linked together and accessed from any computer installed with a web browser.