Because of the transition to remote and digital work, our reliance on the internet has increased rapidly these past couple of years. The internet is a wide worldwide network that makes us able to access the web. The web, or also called the World Wide Web, is a wide system of information. Any information we search or share is broken down into pieces of data. These are then transported over the internet that we access through internet service providers (ISPs).
Here’s a fun fact: World Wide Web is actually the “www” that you see on website links or uniform resource locators (URLs).
URLs are important because they correspond to the unique link of a page. These are the digital “home” address of the bits or pages of information. Example: If someone wanted to visit, they would need the correct and specific address.
More specifically, www.facebook.com is the URL of Facebook. This address will lead you to the Facebook homepage. This could be the login or sign up page if you’re not logged in to your account. It will also redirect to your personal news feed if you are logged in. If you go to www.facebook.com/McDonalds, this address will lead you to the Facebook account or page of McDonald’s.
Provided that the Web is a massive archive of different links and addresses, tools and pages like Google, Bing, and other search engines have made it easier and faster for people to find the links to pages and information they’re looking for.
History of the WWW
The Web was developed by computer scientists Robert Cailliau and Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Although there were several projects with the concept of an on-line information system have been around since the 1960s. Inspired by hyperlinks, Berners-Lee envisioned a system that allows the use of hyperlinks to access information over the internet. This vision became more and more possible through the developments to the internet. Without the improvements of the technology of IP connections and global internet, the conception of the Web would have been too advanced for its time.
Berners-Lee was also the one who developed the URLs, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which is the publishing language used in the coding of websites and pages; and the set of rules applied to load these pages, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
