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WWW
The World Wide Web is the application on the Internet that allows people and
organizations to publish information: text, pictures, sound, video, and more.
A single document on the web is called a web page. A collection of
documents produced by the same author or authors is called a web site.
The World Wide Web was designed to be flexible. Today, many web sites
transparently incorporate other applications of the Internet without the end
user realizing they are using another part of the Internet. People often speak
of going to a web site to download information or software. Downloading actually
uses the application of the Internet called FTP (see below), but to the end user,
they just go to a web site, click on a link to the file or software they
need and then their computer starts transferring that file to them. As far as
they are concerned, they haven't left the World Wide Web at all. For this reason,
many people confuse the World Wide Web with the Internet and will say things
like "I put the picture of my new car on the Internet" when what they means is
something more like "I put the picture of my new car on my web site." The
World Wide Web is just one of many applications of the Internet.
Note: The "real life" equivalent of the World Wide Web depends on what type
of web site you are looking at. If it is an informational site, the equivalent
would be other (paper) types of publications: newsletters, books, magazines.
The difference is in cost and distribution: more traditional publications are
very expensive to get started, and it is hard to achieve a wide distribution.
With the World Wide Web, it is fairly inexpensive to get started (in fact there
are many web sites where you can publish information/pictures for free) so almost
anybody can publish anything. One of the goals of this class is to give you the
skills you need to evaluate the content of web pages, and to figure out the
qualifications of the person who created them.
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