User:Mookanah/Workshop 7: Online Information Gathering/The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (www)

The wide web (www or simply the web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents that run over the Internet. 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.

A Browser

A browser is a computer program that resides on your computer enabling you to use the computer to view WWW documents and access the Internet taking advantage of text formatting, hypertext links, images, sounds, motion, blogs, and other features, e.g. Internet Explorer or Netscape.
The main way in which browsers differ is in the convenience features they offer for navigating and managing the Web and all the URLs you may want to keep track of. Netscape and Internet Explorer both offer the ability to e-mail documents, download them to diskette, print them, and keep track of where you've been and sites you want to "bookmark" or "Add to Favorites" (Microsoft's name bookmarks).

The Internet

The Internet is a network of networks, linking computers to computers allowing access to information stored in the web. Each runs software to provide or "serve" information and/or to access and view information. The Internet is the transport vehicle for the information stored in files or documents on another computer. It can be compared to an international communications utility servicing computers.

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)

URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is a reference (an address) to a resource on the Internet. The internet name of the site containing the resource (document or data)
The resource name is the complete address to the resource. The format of the resource name depends entirely on the protocol used, but for many protocols, including HTTP, the resource name contains one or more of the components listed in the following table:

Protocol - is the service specifier, (here HTTP service) which specifies the access method. Specifically this is the part before the colon. Some examples of services are: http:, gopher:, wais: and ftp:.

Host Name - The name of the machine on which the resource lives.

File and resource details - The pathname to the file on the machine.

For many protocols, the host name and the filename are required, while the port number and reference are optional. For example, the resource name for an HTTP URL must specify a server on the network (Host Name) and the path to the document on that machine (Filename); it also can specify a port number and a reference.

Examples

http://www.ub.bw
http://www.ub.bw/library
http://www.gov.bw

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web
http://www.wordiq.com/definition/World_Wide_Web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
http://webopedia.internet.com/TERM/I/Internet.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Locator
--Mookanah 08:06, 20 March 2009 (UTC)