Easy Web Site Design

The Internet is the worldwide network of computers and computer networks which are able to communicate and share resources by means of the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol) protocols. The term "Internet" generally refers to the infrastructure eg computers, cables and other equipment. The Internet supports a number of services eg e-mail, USENET newsgroups and the World Wide Web, WWW.

The World Wide Web (or WWW or just Web) is the vast collection of hypertext pages hosted on Web servers and accessible across the Internet by means of the HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) protocol. Web pages are viewable in software programs called Web browsers (eg Internet Explorer and Netscape).

Web pages are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and may contain text, images, sound, animation, video and interactive elements. In addition Web pages contain hyperlinks to other, related, Web pages. A hyperlink is a specially formatted piece of text or other element which, when clicked with a mouse, opens another Web resource in the user's browser.

A brief history

In the late 1960s the U.S. Defense Department developed a secure and robust communications network (ARPANET) linking organizations engaged in defense research. ARPANET was designed to be able to continue functioning even if part of it was damaged, eg by nuclear attack. During the 1970s ARPANET became increasingly used by academics for sharing research material and eventually evolved into the worldwide network of inter-connected networks known as the Internet.

In 1989 Tim Berners Lee proposed the World Wide Web while working at CERN, the Swiss based sub-nuclear physics research organization. Berners Lee initially envisaged a text based global hypertext system enabling fast and efficient communication between scientists located around the world and released the first text based browser in January 1992.

The 1990s saw the advent of affordable desktop computers together with the emergence of Microsoft's Windows, with its "user friendly" graphical interface, as the dominant personal computer (PC) operating system. These developments made computing accessible to the masses. At the same time services such as CompuServe and America Online allowed home computer users to share centralized resources and interact with one another.

1992 saw the release of Mosaic, the first web browser with a graphical interface. The web started to become the familiar face of the Internet providing easy access to a wealth of text, images, animation, sound and video.

For more about the history of the Internet and the Web, see the resources listed at The Internet Society's (ISOC) History of the Internet and the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Little History of the World Wide Web.

See also The Internet and its likely Impact upon Society, Business and the Economy

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