Definition of World Wide Web & WWE Technologies - Internet & World Wide Web, E-Commerce | E-Commerce - B Com PDF Download

DEFINITION OF WORLD WIDE WEB (WEB, WWW OR W3)

World Wide Web (www) is a repository of information spread all over the world and linked together. WWW uses the concept of hypertext. In this environment, information is stored in a set of documents. Concept of pointers are used to link the documents together. An item could be associated with another document using the pointers. A reader who browses through a document can move to other documents by clicking the items that are linked to other documents. A hypertext on the web is known as a page and the main page for an organisation / an individual is called as a home page. After establishing a web hosting arrangement with ISP it will allocate storage space on its server that will be accessed each time a request comes in. We are now ready to create our first web page or home page or index page and load it into this storage space. Web pages are created, using one of the many web design software packages like ‘Quicksite’ or Microsoft’s ‘Front page’ or by utilising the services of a web designer. Web pages utilize the main software language of the Internet HTML although many now use other languages and software in addition to HTML, such as Java by Sun Microsystems or Coldfusion by Allaire. Information on any subject can be:

• Undistributed -whole information may consist of one or more web pages on the same server.
• Distributed -Information made up of many pages distributed on different servers.

It is another information retrieval tool. The web is attractively easy to use, and lends itself to publishing or providing information to anyone interested. Its popularity has increased dramatically, because of easy usage, colorful and rich in content. Web is a series of interconnected documents stored on computer sites. If you use your computer and a software program (browser) to visit a site on the web, the screen displays a document called a home page. Home page gives the name of the organisation or individual sponsoring the website and displays a list of highlighted words, buttons or pictures. It is the text and graphical screen display that welcomes the user and explains the organisation that has established the page. This will lead to other pages, with all the pages of company being known as a website. For a corporation to establish a presence on the web, therefore, it must set up a website of its one or more pages. The web is a network of billions of interlinked documents. These links called hyperlinks or links are the highlighted words, buttons, icons or pictures. Each link contains the address of another document on the  same computer or another computer anywhere in the world; from this one can jump to the linked pages by clicking on one of these links. Clicking them plays videos, music, 3D animations or takes one through a virtual reality experience.

It is a set of standards for storing, retrieving, formatting and displaying information using a client / server architecture, graphical user interfaces (GUI) and a hyper text language that enable dynamic links to other documents. It is one of the most exciting Internet services. Worldwide Web (www) has a vast canvas of web servers that provide an idea almost similar to that of a hypertext. A page in hypertext may contain links that point to other documents or to other segments in the same document. When users click on a link, they jump to other documents/other segments in the same document. Users can navigate the web easily, pushing their interests.

One of the main functions of the Internet is easy to use offerings of information and products. This function is provided by the World Wide Web which is at the heart of the recent explosion in the business use of the Net. This is based on an hypertext language called Hypertext Mark up Language (HTML} that formats documents and incorporates dynamic links to other documents and pictures stored in the same or remote computers.

World Wide Web and Internet are not the same though people think they are the same. The  Internet is the network itself and many activities other than the world wide web  will be done on it. The services like E-mail, Gopher, Usenet news groups are available separately, and access to them has been integrated into the world wide web. While the other methods of locating information on the Net are mainly text based, the web pages have made an impact by combining text, hypermedia, graphics and sound. Through the use of web, commercial enterprises are providing information on demand (say customer support, marketing and sales). The specific hypermedia technology used in the web is known as hyperlink, navigating (or surfing} the web requires a graphics computer linked to the Internet and web browser. The user must also have a special software tool to navigate the web known as a web browser. A popular web browser is Mosaic, developed by the National Centre for Super Computing Applications. There is another web browser known as Travel Web, a website that gives complete details of electronic information on 16 resort hotels in the USA and the Caribbean and similar information on 87 non-resort hotels in North America. Prospective travellers can use Travel Web any time to find out information on hotel details, sight seeing attractions related to USA and Caribbean. The world wide web needs:

• A functional architecture.
• A structural Architecture and
• A navigational architecture

WWW TECHNOLOGIES 

Web Page

A web page is a single unit of information, often called a document that is available via the World Wide Web (www). A web page can be longer than one computer screen and can use more than one piece of paper when it is printed out.
A web page is created using HTML. It consists of standardized codes or “tags”, that are used to define the structure of information on a web page. These codes enable web pages to have many features including bold text, italic text, headings, paragraph break and numbered or bulleted lists.

Web Browser : Web browsers are applications that retrieve content in the form of HTML from web servers. Browsers keep track of the users input actions, for example; clicking buttons or selecting links-and executing those actions.

By 1992, the basic idea of hypertext-data containing links to other data had been explored and was widely accessible on the net. However, the number of people using the web was still small. This was because the principal web client programmes ran under text-based Unix systems and were awkward to use.

This all changed in 1993, when Mark Andersen; then a student at the University of Illinois, released a new programme called Mosaic. Mosaic was the original graphical web browser. Mosaic used the original text web browser, Linux as a model. After the release of Mosaic, the popularity of the World Wide Web exploded. Mark Andersen formed a new company Netscape and released Netscape navigator.

After the release of navigator 2, Microsoft woke up to the Internet and realized the vast potential of this entirely new market. In short time the company released Internet explorer, which in its original version wasn’t very compelling.

Other web browsers were spry Mosaic, Lynx, HotJava etc. Spry Mosaic is a licensed descendent of NCSA Mosaic. Spry has licensed it for use as the CompuServe web browser. Lynx is the original text only web browser developed at CERN to support only pure HTML. HotJava is a web browser that Sun wrote entirely in Java as a demonstration of the programming power of the Java language.

Netscape communicator (initially called as Netscape navigator) and Internet explorer are the two browsers that are most popular. Regardless of which browser you use, web browsers may support some or all of these features:

• Bookmarks for favorite web sites
•  Multiple browsing windows
• Frames or multiple views within a window
• Secure data transmission
• Java and other languages support
• Web interface to FTP and Gopher Internet sites.

Hypertext Markup language (HTML) HTML defines several aspects of a web page including heading levels, bold, italics, images, paragraph breaks and hypertext links to other resources. HTML can be compared to word processing. The text in a word processed file can be formatted in various ways. For example, a heading can be bold and in larger font size than the rest of the document. Also, specific words can be italicized for emphasis.

Thus, HTML is a way to define the formats of text in a web page. However, it goes further by also being able to define placement of graphics and hypertext links. HTML is a sub-language of SGML, or Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML is a system that defines and standardizes the structure of documents. Both SGML and HTML utilize descriptive markup to define the structure of an area of text. In general terms, descriptive markup does not specify a particular font or point size for an area of text,

Therefore, in HTML, text is marked as a heading, subheading, numbered list, bold, italic, etc.

HTML is standardized and portable. A document that has been prepared using HTML markup “tag” can be viewed using a variety of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape and Lynx. A browser interprets the tags in an HTML file and presents the file  as a formatted, readable web page. In addition, HTML documents can be viewed on all types of systems, such as Macintosh, PC’s and UNIX machines.

HTML Tags

HTML tags are used to define areas of a document as having certain characteristics. The tags used in HTML usually consist of a code in between two “wickets”. These codes are called container tags because the formatting described by the tag affects only the text contained between the tags. For example, <B> and </B> are the starting and ending tags used to indicate an area as bold. HTML tags are used to define heading levels, such as <Hl> and </Hl>. Heading levels can go to <H6>, with each successive number indicating a smaller heading size.

Some other basic HTML tags are:

• <1> and </1> to indicate italics  

• .<img alt="" src="https://cn.edurev.in/uot;https://cn.edurev.in/dquo;name-of-picture”> to place an image in a document file  
• <p> to create a paragraph break 

In HTML, some codes require end tag and some do not require end tags. In the previous example, the <p> tag indicates a paragraph break. This type of tag is called an empty tag because no end tag is required.

Web pages can contain text, images, sound files, video files and hyperlinks to other internet resources. All these features are indicated by using HTML codes.