What is the World Wide Web (WWW)?

With the communication provided by the internet, we can perform many daily transactions. For example, we can chat with our friends, share/receive files, but besides these, the most common use of the Internet is the World Wide Web. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee established a user-friendly system for categorizing and collecting information, first experimented with at CERN, and, you guessed it, called the World Wide Web.

Structure of the World Wide Web

This network, which we reach thanks to the Internet, is an information system called hypertext, which consists of documents that we see on the screen as text, pictures, videos, but written in the web language (0 and 1), and we call these documents a web page. To write this information in web language, most websites use hypertext markup language (HTML) or Javascript. These texts, written in web language, are converted into texts, images, videos that we can understand by web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer). In addition, thanks to the hyperlinks (Links) in the sites, we can connect to and go to other sites and documents.

When we write the name of the site we want to access in the web browser we use, our computer becomes the client computer and we have a server computer running the web server software in front of us. The communication that begins between the two can be called client-server interaction. Our client computer uses a protocol called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) from the server, which is open to common use and exists for the healthy communication of systems, and besides, the server returns the site or documents we want using the internet message standard (TCP/IP).

An Example of the Operation of the System

As an example; We wanted to open a website named The Science Tech. For this, it is necessary to choose a domain name for the website. Elektrikport.com was chosen as the domain name and this name was registered. As the next step, just as we need an address to find a place in real life, an addressing system called IP (Internet Protocol) is used to find an address in the internet world. In other words, the domain name and IP must match, and the service that provides this match is called DNS (Domain name services).

As a result, we have a registered domain name that matches its IP address, so users all over the world can access our website. The next step is, we typed thesciencetech.com in the Chrome search bar, our browser asked DNS to learn the IP address of the site, and after that, our browser reached the web server of electricport.com as a client and requested the files of the web page. The incoming files were based on html or javascript, as we mentioned before, but our browser created an interface in a language we could understand. We don’t witness any of these things, or rather, we don’t notice because the events are developing so fast. In the last step, when we entered the site, we started to read a nice and explanatory article about the World Wide Web, and on the other hand, we did not neglect to thank Tim Berners-Lee, who provided us with easy access to such information and sites and gifted this to all the people of the world.

Interesting Facts about the Internet and WWW

› In our opinion, the most interesting thing is that the first website established at CERN on December 20, 1990 is still working. The web page contains information and help sections about www.

› www needed a web browser to actually use it. This web browser was also called “Mosaic”, which was founded in 1993.

› The ancestor of search engines such as Google and Yahoo is a search engine called “Archie”.

› To talk about numbers, more than 3 billion users are surfing the internet a day. According to 2018 data, there are 1.8 billion websites and it continues to increase.

› The first picture uploaded for trial purposes on the world wide web is the photos of the 4-member music group “Les Horribles Cernettes” in Switzerland together.

Sources:

› Wikipedia
› TED-ed