Think of the web as the illustrated version of the Internet.
It began in the late 1980's when physicist Dr. Berners-Lee wrote
a small computer program for his own personal use. This program
allowed pages, within his computer, to be linked together using
keywords. It soon became possible to link documents in different
computers, as long as they were connected to the Internet. The document
formatting language used to link documents is called HTML (Hypertext
Markup Language).
The Web
remained primarily text based until 1992. Two events occurred that
year that would forever change the way the Web looked. Marc Andreesen
developed a new computer program called the NCSA Mosaic (National
Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois)
and gave it away! The NCSA Mosaic was the first Web browser.
The browser made it easier to access the different Web sites that
had started to appear. Soon Web sites contained more than just text,
they also had sound and video files.
These
pages, written in the hyper-text markup language, have "links" that
allow the user to quickly move from one document to another...even
when the documents are stored in different computers.
Web browsers
"read" the html text and convert it into a page like the one you
are now looking at.
Each
web site has an address, or Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
The URL contains a set of instructions that are read by the browser.
The beginning
of the URL contains the protocol. This is usually "http" (Hypertext
Transfer Protocol) or "ftp" (File Transfer Protocol). The
second section of the URL reveals the domain. Directories
follow the domain. Lastly is the name of the document.
(If no document is named the browser will automatically open any
document in the directory named "default" or "index.")
