What is the WWW?

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What is the WWW?

• By J. Richard Stevens

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Topics

• Brief history of the Internet and WWW
• Terminology
• Protocols and Addressing
• How publishing works

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History of the Internet/WWW

• 1958 - Advanced Research Projects Agency
  established within the Department of Defense
  (Internet Pioneers)
• 1969 - First node to node transmission from UCLA
  to Stanford - also first crash (IMP Photo)
• 1971 - 15 nodes on Internet

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History of the Internet/WWW

• 1982 - ARPA establishes the Transmission Control
  Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP)
• 1984 - Domain name system introduced, number of
  Internet hosts 1000.
• 1985 - The WELL, first major online community was
  opened

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History of the Internet/WWW

• 1987 - number of hosts 10,000
• 1989 - First commercial electronic mail through
  Internet (MCI and Compuserve) number of hosts
  100,000
• 1991 - World-Wide Web (WWW) released by CERN Tim
  Berners-Lee

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History of the Internet/WWW

• 1992 - number of hosts exceeds 1,000,000
• 1993 - Mosaic browser is introduced, becomes
  Netscape in 1994, Bill Gates prophetic wisdom
• August 1995 - Netscape IPO price 28, opening
  price 71

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History of the Internet/WWW

• 1997 - Bill Gates famous "Internet Tidal Wave"
  speech
• 1998 - DOJ files antitrust suit against Microsoft
  (U.S. vs. Microsoft)
• 1999 - AOL purchases Netscape 2001 - AOL
  purchases Time Warner

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History of the Internet/WWW

• Today over 170 million American adults use the
  Internet, 74 of the adult population (75/73
  gender gap) over 600 million worldwide several
  hundred million Web sites. (Pew Internet and
  American Life Project)

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What is the Internet/WWW?

• Internet - computers hosting the TCP/IP protocol
• World-Wide Web - A visual protocol combining
  hyperlinking with the TCP/IP protocol
• http
• HTML
• URL

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Breaking Down URLs

• Protocol
• http, ftp, telnet, news, mailto
• Name or Address of server
• .com, .edu, .org, .gov, .mil, .biz, .tv
• IP addresses
• File navigation

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WWW supported file types

• Hypertext Markup Language .html
• Joint Photographic Interchange Format .jpg
• Graphics Interchange Format .gif
• Portable Document Format .pdf
• Rich Text Format .rtf
• ASCII text .txt
• Real Audio files .ram, .rm
• Shockwave/Flash .swf, .flv
• Quicktime .mov
• Moving Pictures Experts Group .mpg, .mpeg, .mp3,
  .mp4

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HTML Standards

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)develops and
  maintains standards
• W3C adds, deletes or modifies HTML
  commandscalled tags
• XHTMLthe future of HTML

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How WWW publishing works