Internet & World Wide Web

The Internet is a worldwide, publicly accessible series of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP). It is a "network of networks" that consists of millions of smaller domestic, academic, business, and government networks, which together carry various information and services, such as electronic mail, online chat, file transfer, and the interlinked Web pages and other documents of the World Wide Web.

WWW's historical logo designed by Robert CailliauThe World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, a user views web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee from the United Kingdom, and Robert Cailliau from Belgium, working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of web standards (such as the markup languages in which web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web.

The Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous. The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fiber-optic cables, wireless connections, etc. In contrast, the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs. The World Wide Web is one of the services accessible via the Internet, along with many others including e-mail, file sharing and others described below. The Internet protocol suite is a collection of standards and protocols organized into layers so that each layer provides the foundation and the services required by the layer above. In this scheme, the Internet consists of the computers and networks that handle Internet Protocol (IP) data packets. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) depends on IP and solves problems like data packets arriving out of order or not at all. Next comes Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which is an application layer protocol. It runs on top of TCP/IP and provides user agents, such as web browsers, with access to the files, documents and other resources of the World Wide Web.