WWW Primer

What is the WWW? How does it work? What is a browser? What is a server?

What is the WWW?

• WWW stands for the World Wide Web
• The World Wide Web is most often called the Web
• The Web is a network of computers all over the world
• All the computers in the Web can communicate with each other
• All the computers use a communication standard called HTTP

How Does the  WWW Work?

• Web information is stored in documents called Web pages
• Web pages are files stored on computers called Web servers
• Computers reading the Web pages are called Web clients
• Web clients view the pages with a program called a Web browser
• Popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox

How Does the Browser Fetch the Pages?

• A browser fetches a Web page from a server by a request
• A request is a standard HTTP request containing a page address
• A page address looks like: http://www.someone.com/page.htm

How Does the Browser Display the Pages?

• All Web pages contain instructions on how to be displayed
• The browser displays the page by reading these instructions
• The most common display instructions are called HTML tags
• The HTML tag for a paragraph looks like this: </p>
• A paragraph in HTML is defined like this <p>This is a Paragraph</p>

Who is Making the Web Standards?

• The Web standards are not made up by Netscape or Microsoft
• The rule-making body of the Web is the W3C
• W3C stands for the World Wide Web Consortium
• W3C puts together specifications for Web standards
• The most essential Web standards are HTML, CSS and XML
• The latest HTML standard is XHTML 1.0

To learn more about W3C, study our W3C Tutorial.

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