Shopping on line can be easy, simple and save you lots of money. It can also take a lot of your time, frustrate you, and result in unwanted purchases. Now the same can be said for regular high street shopping, but with the vast opportunity presented by the Internet it will pay you to spend a few minutes reading this and understanding how to better optimize your World Wide Web shopping experience:

1. Compare - without doubt the biggest advantage that the World Wide Web offers shoppers today is the ability to compare thousands of World Wide Web at a time. This is a great thing, but not necessarily all the time! Too much can be daunting at times so take advantage of the great comparison sites and where possible let them do the hard work for you.

2. Research - if it has been said it will be on the internet. Ignorance is no longer a justifiable reason for buying the wrong thing. Take the time to research in detail everything that you could possible want to know about

3. Testimonials - don't know anybody that has bought a World Wide Web? Wrong! If the World Wide Web is good the internet will let you know. Use the Internet as a friend and get testimonials before you buy.

4. Questions - Got a question about World Wide Web then search the Forums, FAQ's, Blogs etc. Don't be afraid to ask .....

5. Reputation - Never heard of the company selling World Wide Web? Don't worry, no reason why you should know every company in the world, but you know someone that does! Use the internet to find out what people are saying about World Wide Web and build up a picture of their reputation for sales, returns, customer service, delivery etc.

6. Returns - still worried that even after all of the above your World Wide Web wont be what you want? Check out the returns policy. There is so much competition now that someone, somewhere is bound to offer the terms that you are comfortable with.

7. Feedback - happy with your World Wide Web then let people know, after all you are depending on others people input in your buying decision, so why not give a little back.

8. Security - check for the yellow padlock on the World Wide Web site before you buy, and the s after http:/ /i.e. https:// = a secure site

9. Contact - got a question about World Wide Web, or want to leave a comment then check out the sites contact page. Reputable companies have them and respond.

10. Payment - ready to pay for your World Wide Web, then use your credit card or PayPal! Be aware of companies that don't accept them, there may be genuine reasons but given the huge amount of choice you have when buying online there is no reason at all not to buy via credit card or PayPal.

"The World Wide Web" and "WWW" redirect here. For other uses, see Web and WWW (disambiguation). For the web browser, see WorldWideWeb.

The 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 writing, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Sam Walker 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.

How the Web works Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the Uniform Resource Locator of the page into a web browser, or by following a hypertext link to that page or resource. The web browser then begins a series of communications, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it.

First, the server-name portion of the URL is resolved into an IP address using the global, distributed Internet database known as the domain name system, or DNS. This IP address is necessary to contact and send data packets to the web server.

The browser then requests the resource by sending an Hypertext Transfer Protocol request to the web server at that particular address. In the case of a typical web page, the HTML text of the page is requested first and Parsing immediately by the web browser, which will then make additional requests for images and any other files that form a part of the page. Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based on the number of 'page views' or associated server 'Hit (internet)', or file requests, which take place.

Having received the required files from the web server, the browser then rendering (computer graphics) the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and other web languages. Any images and other resources are incorporated to produce the on-screen web page that the user sees.

Most web pages will themselves contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloads, source documents, definitions and other web resources. Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links, is what was dubbed a "web" of information. Making it available on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (note the original name's use of CamelCase, subsequently discarded) in 1990." WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project", Tim Berners-Lee & Robert Cailliau, 1990

Caching If a user revisits a web page after only a short interval, the page data may not need to be re-obtained from the source web server. Almost all web browsers cache recently-obtained data, usually on the local hard drive. HTTP requests sent by a browser will usually only ask for data that has changed since the last download. If the locally-cached data is still current, it will be reused.

Caching helps reduce the amount of web traffic on the Internet. The decision about expiration can be made independently for each downloaded file, whether image, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, HTML, or whatever other content the site may provide. Thus even on sites with highly dynamic content, many of the basic resources may only need to be refreshed once every few sessions. Web site designers may find it worthwhile to collate shared resources such as CSS data and JavaScript into a few site-wide files so that they can be cached efficiently. This helps reduce page download times and lowers demands on the web server.

There are other components of the Internet that can also cache web content. In practice, the most widely-used caches are built into corporate and academic Firewall (networking) which cache web resources requested by one user for the benefit of all. (See also Web proxy#Caching proxy server.) Some search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!, also store cached content from web sites.

Apart from the facilities built into web servers that can determine when files have been updated, designers of dynamically-generated web pages can control the HTTP headers sent back to requesting users, so that transient or sensitive pages are not cached. Internet banking and news sites frequently use these facilities.

Data requested with an HTTP 'GET' is likely to be cached if other conditions are met, whereas data obtained via a 'POST' command is assumed to be dependent on the data that was POSTed and so will not be cached.

History at CERN became the first Web server.

The concept of a home-based global information system goes back at least as far as Isaac Asimov's short story "Anniversary" (Amazing Stories, March 1959), in which the characters look up information on a home computer called a "Multivac outlet" -- which was connected by a "plantewide network of circuits" to a mile-long "super-computer" somewhere in the bowels of the Earth. One character is thinking of installing a Mulitvac, Jr. model for his kids.

Interestingly, the story was set in the far distant future when commercial space travel was commonplace, and yet the machine "prints the answer on a slip of tape" that comes out a slot -- there is no video display -- and the owner of the home computer says that he doesn't spend the kind of money to get a Multivac outlet that talks.

The underlying ideas of the Web can be traced as far back as 1980, when, at CERN in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE (referring to Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book he recalled from his youth). While it was rather different from the system in use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee's next project after the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web).

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal, Information Management: A Proposal which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more elaborate information management system. With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web on November 12, 1990. proposal for the World Wide Web

A NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb the WorldWideWeb (which was a web editor as well), the first web server, and the first web pages first Web pages which described the project itself.

On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. Short summary of the World Wide Web project This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's NLS (computer system) (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex," which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think."

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.

The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then available. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.

On April 30, 1993, CERN announced Ten Years Public Domain for the Original Web Software that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the announcement that the Gopher (protocol)#Decline protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW, which was based upon HyperCard.

Scholars generally agree, however, that the Mosaic (web browser)#Importance of Mosaic for the World Wide Web began with the introductionhttp://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_mosaic.htm of the Mosaic (web browser) web browserhttp://www.totic.org/nscp/demodoc/demo.html in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, also known as the Gore Bill.http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/faculty.lecture/innovation/gore.html (See Al Gore's contributions to the Internet and technology for more information.) Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages, and its popularity was less than older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher (protocol) and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol.

Standards Many formal standards and other technical specifications define the operation of different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information exchange. Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other organizations.

Usually, when web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as foundational:

Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:



Java and JavaScript A significant advance in Web technology was Sun Microsystems Java platform. It enables web pages to embed small programs (called applets) directly into the view. These applets run on the end-user's computer, providing a richer user interface than simple web pages. Java client-side applets never gained the popularity that Sun had hoped for a variety of reasons, including lack of integration with other content (applets were confined to small boxes within the rendered page) and the fact that many computers at the time were supplied to end users without a suitably installed Java Virtual Machine, and so required a download by the user before applets would appear. Adobe Flash now performs many of the functions that were originally envisioned for Java applets, including the playing of video content, animation, and some rich Graphical user interface features. Java (programming language) itself has become more widely used as a platform and language for server-side and other programming.

JavaScript, on the other hand, is a Scripting programming language that was initially developed for use within web pages. The standardized version is ECMAScript. While its name is similar to Java, JavaScript was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and it has almost nothing to do with Java, although, like Java, its syntax is derived from the C (programming language). In conjunction with a web page's Document Object Model, JavaScript has become a much more powerful technology than its creators originally envisioned. The manipulation of a page's Document Object Model after the page is delivered to the client has been called Dynamic HTML (DHTML), to emphasize a shift away from static HTML displays.

In simple cases, all the optional information and actions available on a JavaScript-enhanced web page will have been downloaded when the page was first delivered. Ajax (programming) ("Asynchronous JavaScript And XML") is a JavaScript-based technology that provides a method whereby parts within a web page may be updated, using new information obtained over the network at a later time in response to user actions. This allows the page to be more responsive, interactive and interesting, without the user having to wait for whole-page reloads. Ajax is seen as an important aspect of what is being called Web 2.0. Examples of Ajax techniques currently in use can be seen in Gmail, Google Maps, and other dynamic web applications.

Publishing web pages Web pages are available to individuals outside mass media. In order to publish a web page, one does not have to go through a publisher or other media institution, and potential readers could be found in all corners of the globe.

Unlike books and other documents, hypertext does not need to have a linear order from beginning to end. It is not necessarily broken down into the hierarchy of chapters, sections, subsections, and so on.

Many different kinds of information are now available on the Web, and for those who wish to know other societies, cultures, and peoples, it has become easier. When traveling in a foreign country or a remote town, one might be able to find some information about the place on the Web, especially if the place is in one of the developed countries. Local newspapers, government publications, and other materials are easier to access, and therefore the variety of information obtainable with the same effort may be said to have increased for the users of the Internet.

Although some web sites are available in multiple languages, many are in the local language only. Additionally, not all software supports all special characters, and Bi-directional text languages. These factors would challenge the notion that the World Wide Web will bring a unity to the world.

The increased opportunity to publish materials is certainly observable in the countless personal pages, as well as pages by families, small shops, etc., facilitated by the emergence of free web hosting services.

Statistics According to a 2001 study, there were more than 550 billion documents on the Web, mostly in the "invisible web", or deep web. The 'Deep' Web: Surfacing Hidden Value A 2002 survey of 2,024 million web pageshttp://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html determined that by far the most web content was in English: 56.4%; next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent study, which used web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web, determined that there were over 11.5 billion web pages in the Surface Web as of the end of January 2005.http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/

Speed issues Frustration over congestion issues in the Internet infrastructure and the high Latency (engineering) that results in slow browsing has led to an alternative, pejorative name for the World Wide Web: the World Wide Wait. Speeding up the Internet is an ongoing discussion over the use of peering and Quality of service technologies. Other solutions to reduce the World Wide Wait can be found on W3C.

Standard guidelines for ideal web response times are (Nielsen 1999, page 42): These numbers are useful for planning server capacity.

Link rot and web archival Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This phenomenon is referred to in some circles as "link rot" and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead links".

The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive web sites. The Internet Archive is one of the most well-known efforts; it has been active since 1996.

Academic conferences The major academic event covering the Web is the World Wide Web series of conferences, promoted by IW3C2.

WWW prefix in web addresses The letters "www" are commonly found at the beginning of web addresses because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. So for example, the host name for a web server is often "www"; for an FTP server, "ftp"; and for a USENET news server, "news" or "nntp" (after the news protocol NNTP). These host names appear as Domain name system subdomain names, as in "www.example.com".

This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; indeed, the first web server was at "nxoc01.cern.ch",http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html and even today many web sites exist without a "www" prefix. The "www" prefix has no meaning in the way the main web site is shown. The "www" prefix is simply one choice for a web site's subdomain name.

Some web browsers will automatically try adding "www." to the beginning, and possibly ".com" to the end, of typed URLs if no host is found without them. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari (web browser), and Opera (Internet suite) will also prefix "http://www." and append ".com" to the address bar contents if the Control and Enter keys are pressed simultaneously. For example, entering "example" in the address bar and then pressing either just Enter or Control+Enter will usually resolve to "http://www.example.com", depending on the exact browser version and its settings.

Pronunciation of "www" In English language, "www" (pronounced "double you double you double you") is the longest possible three-letter acronym to pronounce, requiring nine syllables.

In Chinese language, the World Wide Web is commonly translated to wàn wéi wǎng (), which satisfies "www" and literally means "ten-thousand dimensional net".

See also

References General Specific

External links

"The World Wide Web" and "WWW" redirect here. For other uses, see Web and WWW (disambiguation). For the web browser, see WorldWideWeb.

The 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 writing, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks. The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Sam Walker 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.

How the Web works Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the Uniform Resource Locator of the page into a web browser, or by following a hypertext link to that page or resource. The web browser then begins a series of communications, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it.

First, the server-name portion of the URL is resolved into an IP address using the global, distributed Internet database known as the domain name system, or DNS. This IP address is necessary to contact and send data packets to the web server.

The browser then requests the resource by sending an Hypertext Transfer Protocol request to the web server at that particular address. In the case of a typical web page, the HTML text of the page is requested first and Parsing immediately by the web browser, which will then make additional requests for images and any other files that form a part of the page. Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based on the number of 'page views' or associated server 'Hit (internet)', or file requests, which take place.

Having received the required files from the web server, the browser then rendering (computer graphics) the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML, Cascading Style Sheets, and other web languages. Any images and other resources are incorporated to produce the on-screen web page that the user sees.

Most web pages will themselves contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloads, source documents, definitions and other web resources. Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links, is what was dubbed a "web" of information. Making it available on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (note the original name's use of CamelCase, subsequently discarded) in 1990." WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project", Tim Berners-Lee & Robert Cailliau, 1990

Caching If a user revisits a web page after only a short interval, the page data may not need to be re-obtained from the source web server. Almost all web browsers cache recently-obtained data, usually on the local hard drive. HTTP requests sent by a browser will usually only ask for data that has changed since the last download. If the locally-cached data is still current, it will be reused.

Caching helps reduce the amount of web traffic on the Internet. The decision about expiration can be made independently for each downloaded file, whether image, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript, HTML, or whatever other content the site may provide. Thus even on sites with highly dynamic content, many of the basic resources may only need to be refreshed once every few sessions. Web site designers may find it worthwhile to collate shared resources such as CSS data and JavaScript into a few site-wide files so that they can be cached efficiently. This helps reduce page download times and lowers demands on the web server.

There are other components of the Internet that can also cache web content. In practice, the most widely-used caches are built into corporate and academic Firewall (networking) which cache web resources requested by one user for the benefit of all. (See also Web proxy#Caching proxy server.) Some search engines, such as Google or Yahoo!, also store cached content from web sites.

Apart from the facilities built into web servers that can determine when files have been updated, designers of dynamically-generated web pages can control the HTTP headers sent back to requesting users, so that transient or sensitive pages are not cached. Internet banking and news sites frequently use these facilities.

Data requested with an HTTP 'GET' is likely to be cached if other conditions are met, whereas data obtained via a 'POST' command is assumed to be dependent on the data that was POSTed and so will not be cached.

History at CERN became the first Web server.

The concept of a home-based global information system goes back at least as far as Isaac Asimov's short story "Anniversary" (Amazing Stories, March 1959), in which the characters look up information on a home computer called a "Multivac outlet" -- which was connected by a "plantewide network of circuits" to a mile-long "super-computer" somewhere in the bowels of the Earth. One character is thinking of installing a Mulitvac, Jr. model for his kids.

Interestingly, the story was set in the far distant future when commercial space travel was commonplace, and yet the machine "prints the answer on a slip of tape" that comes out a slot -- there is no video display -- and the owner of the home computer says that he doesn't spend the kind of money to get a Multivac outlet that talks.

The underlying ideas of the Web can be traced as far back as 1980, when, at CERN in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee built ENQUIRE (referring to Enquire Within Upon Everything, a book he recalled from his youth). While it was rather different from the system in use today, it contained many of the same core ideas (and even some of the ideas of Berners-Lee's next project after the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web).

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal, Information Management: A Proposal which referenced ENQUIRE and described a more elaborate information management system. With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal for the World Wide Web on November 12, 1990. proposal for the World Wide Web

A NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb the WorldWideWeb (which was a web editor as well), the first web server, and the first web pages first Web pages which described the project itself.

On August 6, 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup. Short summary of the World Wide Web project This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.

The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu and Douglas Engelbart's NLS (computer system) (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex," which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think."

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere: the Uniform Resource Identifier.

The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then available. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.

On April 30, 1993, CERN announced Ten Years Public Domain for the Original Web Software that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the announcement that the Gopher (protocol)#Decline protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW, which was based upon HyperCard.

Scholars generally agree, however, that the Mosaic (web browser)#Importance of Mosaic for the World Wide Web began with the introductionhttp://www.livinginternet.com/w/wi_mosaic.htm of the Mosaic (web browser) web browserhttp://www.totic.org/nscp/demodoc/demo.html in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a funding program initiated by then-Senator Al Gore's High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, also known as the Gore Bill.http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/lazowska/faculty.lecture/innovation/gore.html (See Al Gore's contributions to the Internet and technology for more information.) Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages, and its popularity was less than older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher (protocol) and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol.

Standards Many formal standards and other technical specifications define the operation of different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information exchange. Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and other organizations.

Usually, when web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as foundational:

Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:



Java and JavaScript A significant advance in Web technology was Sun Microsystems Java platform. It enables web pages to embed small programs (called applets) directly into the view. These applets run on the end-user's computer, providing a richer user interface than simple web pages. Java client-side applets never gained the popularity that Sun had hoped for a variety of reasons, including lack of integration with other content (applets were confined to small boxes within the rendered page) and the fact that many computers at the time were supplied to end users without a suitably installed Java Virtual Machine, and so required a download by the user before applets would appear. Adobe Flash now performs many of the functions that were originally envisioned for Java applets, including the playing of video content, animation, and some rich Graphical user interface features. Java (programming language) itself has become more widely used as a platform and language for server-side and other programming.

JavaScript, on the other hand, is a Scripting programming language that was initially developed for use within web pages. The standardized version is ECMAScript. While its name is similar to Java, JavaScript was developed by Netscape Communications Corporation and it has almost nothing to do with Java, although, like Java, its syntax is derived from the C (programming language). In conjunction with a web page's Document Object Model, JavaScript has become a much more powerful technology than its creators originally envisioned. The manipulation of a page's Document Object Model after the page is delivered to the client has been called Dynamic HTML (DHTML), to emphasize a shift away from static HTML displays.

In simple cases, all the optional information and actions available on a JavaScript-enhanced web page will have been downloaded when the page was first delivered. Ajax (programming) ("Asynchronous JavaScript And XML") is a JavaScript-based technology that provides a method whereby parts within a web page may be updated, using new information obtained over the network at a later time in response to user actions. This allows the page to be more responsive, interactive and interesting, without the user having to wait for whole-page reloads. Ajax is seen as an important aspect of what is being called Web 2.0. Examples of Ajax techniques currently in use can be seen in Gmail, Google Maps, and other dynamic web applications.

Publishing web pages Web pages are available to individuals outside mass media. In order to publish a web page, one does not have to go through a publisher or other media institution, and potential readers could be found in all corners of the globe.

Unlike books and other documents, hypertext does not need to have a linear order from beginning to end. It is not necessarily broken down into the hierarchy of chapters, sections, subsections, and so on.

Many different kinds of information are now available on the Web, and for those who wish to know other societies, cultures, and peoples, it has become easier. When traveling in a foreign country or a remote town, one might be able to find some information about the place on the Web, especially if the place is in one of the developed countries. Local newspapers, government publications, and other materials are easier to access, and therefore the variety of information obtainable with the same effort may be said to have increased for the users of the Internet.

Although some web sites are available in multiple languages, many are in the local language only. Additionally, not all software supports all special characters, and Bi-directional text languages. These factors would challenge the notion that the World Wide Web will bring a unity to the world.

The increased opportunity to publish materials is certainly observable in the countless personal pages, as well as pages by families, small shops, etc., facilitated by the emergence of free web hosting services.

Statistics According to a 2001 study, there were more than 550 billion documents on the Web, mostly in the "invisible web", or deep web. The 'Deep' Web: Surfacing Hidden Value A 2002 survey of 2,024 million web pageshttp://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html determined that by far the most web content was in English: 56.4%; next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent study, which used web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web, determined that there were over 11.5 billion web pages in the Surface Web as of the end of January 2005.http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~asignori/web-size/

Speed issues Frustration over congestion issues in the Internet infrastructure and the high Latency (engineering) that results in slow browsing has led to an alternative, pejorative name for the World Wide Web: the World Wide Wait. Speeding up the Internet is an ongoing discussion over the use of peering and Quality of service technologies. Other solutions to reduce the World Wide Wait can be found on W3C.

Standard guidelines for ideal web response times are (Nielsen 1999, page 42): These numbers are useful for planning server capacity.

Link rot and web archival Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This phenomenon is referred to in some circles as "link rot" and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead links".

The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive web sites. The Internet Archive is one of the most well-known efforts; it has been active since 1996.

Academic conferences The major academic event covering the Web is the World Wide Web series of conferences, promoted by IW3C2.

WWW prefix in web addresses The letters "www" are commonly found at the beginning of web addresses because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. So for example, the host name for a web server is often "www"; for an FTP server, "ftp"; and for a USENET news server, "news" or "nntp" (after the news protocol NNTP). These host names appear as Domain name system subdomain names, as in "www.example.com".

This use of such prefixes is not required by any technical standard; indeed, the first web server was at "nxoc01.cern.ch",http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html and even today many web sites exist without a "www" prefix. The "www" prefix has no meaning in the way the main web site is shown. The "www" prefix is simply one choice for a web site's subdomain name.

Some web browsers will automatically try adding "www." to the beginning, and possibly ".com" to the end, of typed URLs if no host is found without them. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari (web browser), and Opera (Internet suite) will also prefix "http://www." and append ".com" to the address bar contents if the Control and Enter keys are pressed simultaneously. For example, entering "example" in the address bar and then pressing either just Enter or Control+Enter will usually resolve to "http://www.example.com", depending on the exact browser version and its settings.

Pronunciation of "www" In English language, "www" (pronounced "double you double you double you") is the longest possible three-letter acronym to pronounce, requiring nine syllables.

In Chinese language, the World Wide Web is commonly translated to wàn wéi wǎng (), which satisfies "www" and literally means "ten-thousand dimensional net".

See also

References General Specific

External links



National Statistics Online
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World-Wide Web from FOLDOC
World-Wide Web < World-Wide Web , networking , hypertext > (WWW, W3, The Web) An Internet client-server hypertext distributed information retrieval system which originated from the ...

World-Wide Web from FOLDOC
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World Wide Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 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 ...

About The World Wide Web
About The World Wide Web The World Wide Web (known as "WWW', "Web" or "W3") is the universe of network-accessible information, the embodiment of human knowledge.

World Wide Web Consortium - Web Standards
International industry consortium founded in 1994 whose purpose is to develop specifications, guidelines, software, and tools to promote the Internet's evolution and ensure its ...

Amazon.co.uk: Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide ...
Amazon.co.uk: Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web: Tim Berners-Lee: Books ... This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime, but millions of other items are.

The World-Wide Web Virtual Library: Oceanography
A virtual library referencing oceanography related universities, organisations, conferences and other information resources.

BBC NEWS | Technology | How the web went world wide
Fifteen years ago web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee published details of his technology online. ... From its origins at the Cern lab the web has become a phenomenon

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