What is the World Wide Web (WWW)?

A hypertext information system

As I mentioned in the last section, the WWW isn't the Internet, despite the references you'll often hear to "My page is up on the Net" or "I saw your page on the Internet."

What the World Wide Web is, is a hypertext information system. So what is hypertext? The encyclopedia definition says (among other things) that it is a "technique for organizing computer ... documents to facilitate the nonsequential retrieval of information."

What this means, in plain English, is that hypertext is a non-linear way to get information. If you are reading a hypertext document, you can skip around and jump from one point to another, jump to other topics, or dig deeper into a specific topic, depending on what you're interested in.

By the way, did you see all the examples of hypertext links in these last few paragraphs? All of those highlighted sections of text were hypertext links. You could click on them, if you so desire, to see where they lead you.

Here's another typical use of hypertext:

Let's say you're reading a sentence in an online novel: "The tabby cat lay sleeping on the veranda." If this novel makes use of hypertext, you might find that the words "tabby cat" are highlighted, like this:

"The tabby cat lay sleeping on the veranda."

If you so desire, you can select those words and find out, perhaps, more info on tabby cats. Or why the author chose a tabby cat instead of, say, an Irish setter puppy. In this case, clicking on the highlighted text "tabby cat" will show you a picture of the tabby cat that might have inspired the author to write this novel.

As you might have gathered by now, when I say hypertext I don't mean just text, of course. The WWW can handle many kinds of information. Text, images, sounds, moving images... you name it.

Distributed hypertext

The WWW uses distributed hypertext to provide information, and it uses the Internet as its "pathway," so to speak, to get the information to you. What this means is that the information doesn't have to be stored in one place. Information can be located -- distributed -- throughout any part of the web.

In the third paragraph above, the link "jump to other topics" links to a computer on Beacon Hill in Seattle, Washington -- but the link to "dig deeper into a specific topic" links to a computer in the United Kingdom. And this link is to a computer in Japan. It doesn't matter where the web server is located -- as long as it is connected to the Web. By clicking on all of those links, you just went on a virtual world tour -- in less than five minutes!

How does the WWW relate to the Internet, again?

Remember, in the last section I said:

The Internet is not the Web (and vice versa)

What the Internet is to the Web, essentially, is the road by which WWW information travels to you. Imagine that a Web site is a bus, or a car full of information. For that information to reach you, it has to travel on a road of some sort. Think of the Internet as the road that the Web information uses to get to you. (Remember that old Al Gore phrase, "The Information Superhighway"? Well, in some ways it wasn't that far off.)

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