The World Wide Web

Hundreds of millions of people using the World Wide Web everyday. But what is the web? The web, short for the World Wide Web, is a global network connecting millions of documents, called web pages, stored as files on computers called web servers. Web servers often contain groups of web pages that together make up a web site. Web pages are formatted using a special language, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), discussed later in this book. Web users view these files using a client program called a web browser, which has become a crucial software program for personal computers.

Browsers

The web is based on a client/server model. The client runs browser software that allows a user to request information on the web and to browse and navigate through it to pick out useful information. The information that you request is stored on a machine called a web server. The function of the web server is to provide (serve up) web documents, pages, and applications to multiple simultaneous browser clients. We will discuss web servers further in Chapter 16.

To view information on the web, you use a program known as a browser, which is a program running on a client machine. Your browser is your user interface as you navigate through the World Wide Web. You provide your browser with the address of a web site (in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) described later in this chapter). The browser then tries to obtain the web page you requested over the Internet. If the browser successfully fetches this page, you can then view information on that page and navigate to locations both on the page and those linked to other pages, through what is referred to as a hot link or hyperlink.