What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW) is a service used to access information over the Internet. The World Wide Web was developed in order to incorporate many different media including text, graphics, sound, and video. The Web has become very popular because of these different media and because it is a hypertext system which is easy to use.

What is Hypertext?
Hypertext allows the user to move from one page to the next on the Web by clicking on highlighted links or underlined terms. Hypertext is structured to follow a train of thought and direct it to related topics of interest. Most documents on the World Wide Web were created using HTML or Hypertext Markup Language. These documents are often referred to as Web Sites, Web pages, or home pages.

WWW Browsers
Browsers are used to display the information on the World Wide Web. Netscape and Microsoft Explorer are graphical browsers which display images and sound as well as text. Through your e-mail account you may access Lynx  a Web browser which displays text but not sounds or images.

Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)
a) A URL is the address of a site or page available on the Internet. Rather than link to a specific page you can type in the address and go directly to the page.
° Example: http://www.nyit.edu/library/welcome.html.

b) Each part of a URL defines a different Internet protocol.
° http://  indicates that the site is a hypertext site or Web Site.
° www.nyit.edu is the address of the computer that is storing the page.
° The domain indicates the type of producer of the site:

° library/  the path of the page, where exactly the page is located.
° welcome.html  the name of the page, the .html tag indicated it is in hypertext.

Return to Internet Training and Tutorials