The World Wide Web
What is the Web?
The World Wide Web, or simply the Web, is the most rapidly expanding part of the Internet. It has transformed the task of finding, and presenting, information on the Internet from a difficult task to an exciting adventure. Technically speaking, the Web is an information retrieval system consisting of an international network of computers - all interconnected. The web also features multimedia, which means that it uses not only text, but also pictures, sound and video.
Links
Links are what makes the Web so valuable. They are simply a way of placing connections into a document that take you directly to another web page - or even another web site. A link can be created in the form of a word, several words, or even an image. When you select a link in your web browser (usually by clicking the link with your mouse), your browser automatically loads whatever the selected link indicates.
Imagine that you're reading a document on the Web about the city of New York. In one section, the words, "Statue of Liberty" could be linked to a brief description of the monument, along with a picture. A link such as this one would differ from rest of the document either by being underlined, coloured, or highlighted, depending on your web browser. More than one of these methods is often used to distinguish links.
What is a Web Browser?
A web browser is a piece of software that views web pages. In addition to simply downloading and displaying text, most web browsers automatically display images or allow you to hear sounds or music from the web page itself. The most common web browsers in current use are Internet Explorer and Netscape. If you have Windows on your computer, it is likely that you will already have a copy of Internet Explorer installed.
Graphics & Sound
One of the most exciting features of the World Wide Web is the ability to include graphics and sound in web pages. Graphics can be in the forms of icons, coloured lines, page backgrounds, or even photographs. Some Web pages also contain sound clips or even background music.
However, every picture or sound on a web page is simply a file that must be downloaded from a remote computer somewhere before it can be seen or heard. The bigger the file, the longer it takes to download - and the longer you will sit at your computer waiting for it to appear. This is the reason why web pages that contain lots of images or sounds often seem to take forever to appear on your screen. You may lose patience and decide to visit another, faster, web site instead. Keep this in mind when deciding the content of your own web site.
