The Background Of The World Wide Web

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Brandon Wenger

Philip B. Hanney

INFOP41

February 8, 2013

THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Introduction

The World Wide Web is a maze of systems that allow users all over the world to communicate with each other. The World Wide Web is impossible to track down because the Web has expanded so much that it is basically a gigantic "web" of systems. The World Wide Web uses Communication, has a set of Web standards to go by and has other information that helps explain more about it.

Communication

The main purpose of the Web is communication. You can use the Web to communicate with people that are in your neighborhood, or people that are halfway around the world. Communicating via the web is also a part of every-day life for most people. As said from About.com: "Right now, all over the world, approximately 605 million people have access to the Web." That’s a big number of people who use the Web daily, and they all have to have ways to communicate with each other.

There are three ways to communicate via the Web:

E-mail

Bulletin boards

Instant Messaging

E-mail. The most common way to communicate on the Web is by e-mail. Also known as electronic mail, the e-mail is a pretty simple communication program. E-mail sends information to other people just like postal services does-only faster and more efficiently. "To get a grasp of what email is it’s best – the terminology indicates it – to think in equivalents of "traditional" postal mail." This quote (taken from About.com) shows the best way to explain e-mail, so I’ll be using this quote for that purpose. The process of using e-mail goes as follows: first, you use your keyboard to type out our message-just like you would write out a letter to someone. You would then write/type in who you are giving the letter to, but instead of putting a stamp on the message like you would in a letter, you just click "send". Then, in a matter of minutes (unlike regular postal mail), the letter would be received by the person you sent it to. BUT, before you can receive your message, the message is sent to the "nearest" receiver, which you then have to go to in order to fetch the message. E-mail is fast and usually has no cost, and, as I have said, is similar to postal mail. But there are a few things E-mail can do that postal services can’t. One of those things is attachments. What this means is that you can attach any file to an e-mail and the person you sent it to will be able to open that file. Some examples are:

Spreadsheets

Reports

Pictures

Games

There is one drawback to e-mail: spam. Spam is unsolicited e-mails that can clog up mail servers in large numbers. This can be extremely irritating when you have hundreds of junk in your inbox and you’re trying to find a good e-mail. Some filters exist that separate e-mails from spam, though.

Bulletin Boards. Bulletin boards on the computer are more commonly known as message boards or internet forums. Online bulletin boards are an open source of communication. If you post something on a message board, it will appear within a day or two and anyone who goes on the board can see what you posted and reply to it. Online bulletin boards are also a place for advertisers to give information about special sales or deals for a certain online shopping site or web page.

Instant Messaging. The only other form of communicating on the Web is instant messaging. Instant messaging can only happen when two or more people are on the internet at the same time. This allows the communicators to be in Real-time. There are many ways of doing this. You can instant message online on certain websites such as Facebook, or you can instant message using web-cams, microphones and headphones. Instant messaging is an immediate way for people to get information. Instant messaging is probably the most popular form of communication, with Facbook being one of the most popular instant messaging web sites.

Web Standards

Web standards are a set of online, well, standards. Web standards determine which programs and systems work better than others, what rules the Web has, who has access to the web and also how a user surfs the web. None of the systems are governed by any special rules unless given some.

Web Systems. There are many different types of web systems and programs on the Web. No matter how many new and old systems the Web has, all of them work together (if some programs better than others). As said before, there are no rules governing these systems unless the systems are given rules. There are thousands, well actually more like millions, of systems in the World Wide Web and not all of them are the same.

Surfing. Surfing the Web is very popular; you do it every time you look up a web site or link. Surfing the Web is a normal thing we do whenever we’re on the Web. We surf to find any kind of information, to find online games to play, or to find a site to shop for items online. In fact, surfing the Web is so common for us that we don’t even think about it. We just go ahead and surf two or three sites, expecting to see the site we’re trying to find. Now, it sometimes may take a very long time for us to surf a site, because sites need a bit of time to load. It can be very frustrating when we’ve been waiting for a site to load for 15 minutes, and it still won’t load. Trust me, I know how that feels.

Access. Access to sites on the Web is not very consistent; the Web has no specific oversight. That means that access to the Web is not democratically divided throughout the world. Some people might be able to get access to a certain site in the U.S.A., but maybe not so in China. That, I would say, is the Web’s greatest flaw.

Rules. The rules of the Web are very fluid. I have already shed some light on the rules of the Web, but I will explain a little more about them. You will find no rules on a site, whereas on a message board you may have to follow guidelines as to what you may post. With no rules to sites, some people might get an unfair advantage to the Web. This is another flaw in the Web’s giant web of information, systems and sites.

Other Information

There is lots of other information about the Web. The only reason this information is in the topic "other information" is because this information can’t go into another topic by itself. One thing know, though, is that the web is based on "human fingerprints". What this means is that the Web is based as much as it can be on human personality. After all, humans did create the Web, so that’s what it should be.

Technology. The technology that we made the World Wide Web with is immensely complex. There is not just one kind of technology that makes up the Web. The Web is made with many technologies. And as we design new technology, we add that type or piece of tech to the Web. In fact, there is so much technology and types of tech in the World Wide Web that the technology is a web itself! And also much like the systems, new technology is added all the time.

Growth. Probably the most amazing part of the Web is its growth. "The growth of the Web has been explosive, to say the very least. There are more people online than at any other point in history, and more people use the Web to shop than at any other time in history." (About.com, again). I think that quote explains exactly how the growth of the web has been.

I would love to say the Web’s growth has been "explosive" over and over again, because that is the truth.

Not for Everyone. Yes, indeed the Web is not for everyone. After all, not everyone, that includes me, uses the Web all the time. As my mom always says, our family is not as "plugged in" as everyone else. And I’m sure that there is other people who either don’t have access to the Web, don’t use the Web often, or is to confused to by the Web to use it often (or at all). I can relate to the last two.

As we discover new technology, we try more and more to make the Web for everyone. We try to "harness the power for everyone" as About.com says.

Originally Designed for Military. The Original intention for the Web was to be used for the military as a strategy of communication between units. Of course, this did not go as the military had planned. Universities found out about it and then there was just no way to stop it from spreading, and spread it did. Just think; back then, the thought of world communication was almost unrealistic to people. Of course, now, we think nothing of typing someone halfway around the world a letter and know that in a few minutes, it will show in their inbox and they will be able to read it.

Conclusion

See how the World Wide Web has revolutionized the world? Without the Web, we would be in a much different situation then we are in now. The Web is used for communication (mostly) and there are many ways not only to communicate, but to do many other things to. The Web has amazing technology, and to think that that it was originally going to be used for the military? Whoa.