The World Wide Web
🎬 Watch the 12:38 video of this chapter ↓You open the CBSE syllabus, click a link to the NCERT book, then another to an article about the person who invented the web. Three websites, on computers in different cities and countries, and you moved between them with three clicks. That web of linked pages has a name.
1What the WWW is
A hyperlink is a link on a page — a word, a button or a picture — that opens another page when you click it. It can lead to a page on the same computer or to one on the other side of the world.
Switch layers, then follow the links from page to page. Drag sideways to turn.
2The web is not the Internet
People use the two words as if they meant the same thing. They do not. Switch the lab to Only the Internet and then to Only the web and you can see the difference.
| The Internet | The World Wide Web | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A worldwide network of computers and devices | A collection of web pages joined by hyperlinks |
| Made of | Computers, cables, routers, wireless links | Pages, pictures, videos and the links between them |
| Began | 1969, as ARPANET | 1989–90, at CERN — twenty years later, on top of the Internet |
| Also carries | Email, VoIP calls, file transfers, online games… | Only web pages and their resources |
Roads and shops
3Who invented it, and from what
Before the web, to read a file on another computer you had to log in to that computer, and every computer stored documents its own way. In 1989–90, Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist working at CERN in Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web by defining three things:
- HTML — one language for writing web pages, so any computer can show them. See the HTML lesson.
- URL (NCERT calls it URI) — a unique address for every page. See the URL lesson.
- HTTP — the rules for fetching a page from where it is stored. See the HTTP lesson.
4From the board papers
▶Show the answer
World Wide Web.
▶Show the answer
The Internet is a worldwide network of interconnected computers. The WWW is a collection of web pages, linked by hyperlinks, that are stored on some of those computers and accessed over the Internet. The web is one service that runs on the Internet.
5Check yourself
Which of these is part of the World Wide Web, rather than only the Internet?
Who invented the World Wide Web?
Web Services, in 12:38
One animated video of the whole chapter, narrated. Watch it before the lessons for the big picture, or after them to revise.