- What is the World Wide Web (WWW)?
- How does the World Wide Web work?
- Features of the World Wide Web
- Importance of the World Wide Web
We explain what the acronym WWW means and how the web works. Why it is important and what are its characteristics.
What is the World Wide Web (WWW)?
It is called the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW) in computing to a global network, consisting of a complex system of hypertext and hypermedia interconnected with each other and which can be accessed through a connection to Internet and a set of software specialized.
The software necessary to visit the WWW is a browser or browser, such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, etc., which represents in a series of windows equipped with text and multimedia every Web page visited. The latter usually require an address html (HyperText Markup Language, or hypertext markup language) that begins with the acronym www.
The World Wide Web, commonly referred to as "the Web" or "the Net," was developed between 1889 and 1990, by scientists at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, and was published in 1993.Since then, this new virtual space has grown and multiplied to become the main means of consulting digital information and telecommunications in the contemporary world.
How does the World Wide Web work?
The Web operates based on a procedure of three great steps, which are:
- Translation. The direction Url (the one that is entered in the browser) is linked to an IP address through a large database distributed Internet (called DNS). Once the IP address is obtained, communication is established between the user and the Web server, and starts the transmission of data.
- HTML request. The browser then it requests the resource and gets the parts of the web page from the requested resources for graphics, text, etc.
- Rendering. The browser then follows the instructions in the html or ccs code to assemble the web page correctly, putting each graphic on its site and each text as it should look. The user can then see it on the screen and can, at his wish, jump to other similar ones.
Features of the World Wide Web
The Web is a dimension of information exchange and multimedia, interactive and remote telecommunications, in which the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of human being.
Statistically, it was estimated in 2002 that of 2,024 million existing web pages, 56.4% were in English language, compared to 7.7% in German, 5.6% in French and 4.95% in Japanese, followed 4% in Spanish.
Many accuse this dominance of the Anglo language of serving as a mechanism for the imposition of language and culture (American) in the rest of the world, thus operating as an imperialist agent in the heart of the globalization computing.
However, other studies show the trend towards the constitution rather of a 2.0 culture, that is, a culture of digital media that would transcend the traditional limits imposed by borders and cultures.
Importance of the World Wide Web
The emergence of the Web changed the world forever. It enabled new and diverse forms of remote access to information, thus changing the way we investigate and spanning enormous distances to enable the communication.
Sending confidential information, promoting and even selling products, the incorporation of the user to social communities (social networks) and ludic, in short, a gigantic variety of activities are available to the human being of today thanks to this new computer space.
Of course, this has also had care implications, as they are a new dimension of the crime (computer crimes or cybercrime), unrestricted access of the users to all kinds of information: legal or illegal, sensitive or public, intimate or informative, which constitutes a challenge when filtering and going to reliable sources, or protecting infants from informative overexposure.