3.3 Internet/ WWW

The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. If the Internet were a road the www would be a bus. But if the Internet was the bus the passengers would be the www. And if the Internet were the passengers the www would be...don’t know. But you get the point.

The Internet is a networking infrastructure connecting millions of computers and allowing them to communicate with each other as long as they are connected to the Internet (or on the bus?). Information is shared between computers on the Internet via a variety of different protocols. The WWW consists of Web Pages constructed using the hypertext markup language protocol which are hosted on servers. The server-client architecture allows the server machines to respond to requests from clients and return the requested HTML documents via the Internet which are interpreted by the client Internet browser as web pages. Internet protocol numbers uniquely identify every computer in the world and are translated into more familiar domain names by the Domain Name System. These are combined with information on the local path of a document to form a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), which allows the server to locate and return the requested page to the client.

The Internet was developed in the 1960s by the American military to create a communications network impervious to nuclear attack. The World Wide Web came in the 1990s, initially as a means to share academic papers across the Internet.

It is easy to become swept up in the hype about the Internet and World Wide Web, however, it is important to consider the socio-economic bias. The digital revolution has occurred predominantly in the western, developed world and a clear digital divide exists.

Here, here and here are the web pages I created in this weeks practical.