World Wide Web

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"WWW" redirects here. For other uses, see WWW (disambiguation). "The Web" redirects here. For other uses, see Web (disambiguation). Not to be confused with the Internet.

World Wide Web

The Web's logo designed by Robert Cailliau

Inventor

Tim Berners-Lee[1]

Company

CERN

Availability

Worldwide

The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW or W3,[2] commonly known as the Web), is a system of interlinked hypertextdocuments accessed via the Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and othermultimedia, and navigate between them via hyperlinks. Using concepts from his earlier hypertext systems like ENQUIRE, British engineer, computer scientist and at that time employee of CERN, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March 1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web.[1] At CERN, a European research organization near Geneva situated on Swiss and French soil,[3] Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will",[4] and they publicly introduced the project in December of the

The NeXT Computer used by Berners-Lee. The handwritten label declares, "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

In the May 1970 issue of Popular Science magazine, Arthur C. Clarke predicted that satellites would someday "bring the accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips" using a console that would combine the functionality of the Xerox, telephone, television and a small computer, allowing data transfer and video conferencing around the globe.[6] In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a proposal that referenced ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, and described a more elaborate information management system. [7] With help from Robert Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal (on 12 November 1990) to build a "Hypertext project" called "WorldWideWeb" (one word, also "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a clientserver architecture.[4] This proposal estimated that a readonly web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available." While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom.[8] The proposal was modeled after the Dynatext SGML reader by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was technically advanced and was a key player in the extension of SGML ISO 8879:1986 to Hypermedia within HyTime, but it was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration.

The CERN datacenter in 2010 housing some WWW servers

A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[9] the first web browser (which was a web editor as well); the first web server; and the first web pages,[10] which described the project itself. On 6 August 1991, he posted a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup.[11] This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet. Many newsmedia have reported that the first photo on the web was uploaded by Berners-Lee in 1992, an image of the CERN house band Les Horribles Cernettes taken by Silvano de Gennaro; Gennaro has disclaimed this story,

writing that media were "totally distorting our words for the sake of cheap sensationalism."[12] The first server outside Europe was set up at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Palo Alto, California, to host the SPIRES-HEP database. Accounts differ substantially as to the date of this event. The World Wide Web Consortium says December 1992,[13] whereas SLAC itself claims 1991.[14][15] This is supported by a W3C document titled A Little History of the World Wide Web.[16] The crucial underlying concept of hypertext originated with older projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex", which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think".
[17]

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book Weaving The Web, he explains that he had repeatedly suggested that a marriage between the two technologies was possible to members of both technical communities, but when no one took up his invitation, he finally tackled the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies: 1. a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere, the Universal Document Identifier (UDI), later known as Uniform Resource Locator (URL) andUniform Resource Identifier (URI); 2. the publishing language HyperText Markup Language (HTML); 3. the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).[18] The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems that were then available. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due.[19] Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW for Unix and the X Windowing System.

Robert Cailliau, Jean-Franois Abramatic of IBM, and Tim Berners-Lee at the 10th anniversary of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction [20] of the Mosaic web browser[21] in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the U.S. High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by U.S. Senator Al Gore.[22] Prior to the release of Mosaic, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages and the Web's popularity was less than older protocols in use over the Internet, such as Gopher and Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Mosaic's graphical user interface allowed the Web to become, by far, the most popular Internet protocol. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in October 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet; a year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission DG InfSo; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University. By the end of 1994, while the total number of websites was still minute compared to present standards, quite a number of notable websites were already active, many of which are the precursors or inspiration for today's most popular services. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created around the world, adding international standards for domain names and HTML. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of web standards (such as the markup languages in which web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of aSemantic Web. The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularizing use of the Internet.[23] Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, World Wide Web is not synonymous with Internet.[24] The Web is a collection of documents and both client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP. Tim BernersLee was knighted in 2004 by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to World Wide Web.

[edit]Function
The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used in everyday speech without much distinction. However, the Internet and the World Wide Web are not one and the same. The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks. In contrast, the Web is one of the services that runs on the Internet. It is a collection of text documents and other resources, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, usually accessed by web browsers from web servers. In short, the Web can be thought of as an application "running" on the Internet.[25] Viewing a web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of communication messages, behind the scenes, in order to fetch and display it. As an example, consider accessing a page with the URLhttp://example.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web . First, the browser resolves the server-name portion of the URL (example.org) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed database known as the Domain Name System (DNS); this lookup returns an IP address such as 208.80.152.2. The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that particular address. It makes the request to a particular application port in the underlying Internet Protocol Suite so that the computer receiving the request can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing such as email delivery; the HTTP protocol normally uses port 80. The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as the two lines of text

GET /wiki/World_Wide_Web HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org

The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfill the request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success, which can be as simple as

HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

followed by the content of the requested page. The Hypertext Markup Language for a basic web page looks like

<html> <head> <title>Example.org The World Wide Web</title> </head>

<body> <p>The World Wide Web, abbreviated as WWW and commonly known ...</p> </body> </html>

The web browser parses the HTML, interpreting the markup (<title>, <p> for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words in order to draw the text on the screen. Many web pages use HTML to reference the URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behavior, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser will make additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types. As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources.

[edit]Linking
Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like

<a href="http://example.org/wiki/Main_Page">Example.org, a free encyclopedia</a>

Graphic representation of a minute fraction of the WWW, demonstratinghyperlinks

Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase, which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990.[4] The hyperlink structure of the WWW is described by the webgraph: the nodes of the webgraph correspond to the web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called dead links. The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive web sites. The Internet Archive, active since 1996, is one of the bestknown efforts.

[edit]Dynamic

updates of web pages

Main article: Ajax (programming)

JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich, then of Netscape, for use within web pages.[26] The standardized version is ECMAScript.[26]To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). Client-side script is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on lapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with the page while data is being retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the server to check whether new information is available.[27]

[edit]WWW

prefix

Many domain names used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear asDomain Name System or [domain name server](DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of 'www' as a subdomain name is not required by any technical or policy standard and many web sites do not use it; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch.[28] According to Paolo Palazzi,[29] who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of 'www' subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page, however the dns records were never switched, and the practice of prepending 'www' to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use 'www', or they invent other subdomain names such as 'www2', 'secure', etc. Many such web servers are set up such that both the domain root (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently, only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root. When a user submits an incomplete domain name to a web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering 'microsoft' may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature started appearing in early versions of Mozilla Firefox, when it still had the working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx.[30] It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices.[31]

In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u. Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub, particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry, in his "Podgrammes" series of podcasts, pronouncing it wuh wuh wuh. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phonosemantic matching town wi wng (), which satisfies www and literally means "myriad dimensional net",[32] a translation that very appropriately reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens.[33] Use of the www prefix is declining as Web 2.0 web applications seek to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable.[34] As the mobile web grows in popularity, services like Gmail.com, MySpace.com, Facebook.com, Bebo.com and Twitter.com are most often discussed without adding www to the domain (or, indeed, the .com).

[edit]Scheme

specifiers: http and https

The scheme specifiers (http:// or https://) in URIs refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol and to HTTP Secure, respectively. Unlike www, which has no specific purpose, these specify the communication protocol to be used for the request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when confidential information such as passwords or banking information are to be exchanged over the public Internet. Web browsers usually prepend http:// to addresses too, if omitted.

[edit]Web

servers

Main article: Web server The primary function of a web server is to deliver web pages on the request to clients. This means delivery of HTML documents and any additional content that may be included by a document, such as images, style sheets and scripts.

[edit]Privacy
Main article: Internet privacy Every time a web page is requested from a web server the server can identify, and usually it logs, the IP address from which the request arrived. Equally, unless set not to do so, most web browsers record the web pages that have been requested and viewed in a history feature, and usually cache much of the content locally. Unless HTTPS encryption is used, web requests and responses travel in plain text across the internet and they can be viewed, recorded and cached by intermediate systems. When a web page asks for, and the user supplies, personally identifiable information such as their real name, address, e-mail address, etc., then a connection can be made between the current web traffic

and that individual. If the website uses HTTP cookies, username and password authentication, or other tracking techniques, then it will be able to relate other web visits, before and after, to the identifiable information provided. In this way it is possible for a web-based organisation to develop and build a profile of the individual people who use its site or sites. It may be able to build a record for an individual that includes information about their leisure activities, their shopping interests, their profession, and other aspects of their demographic profile. These profiles are obviously of potential interest to marketeers, advertisers and others. Depending on the website's terms and conditionsand the local laws that apply information from these profiles may be sold, shared, or passed to other organisations without the user being informed. For many ordinary people, this means little more than some unexpected emails in their in-box, or some uncannily relevant advertising on a future web page. For others, it can mean that time spent indulging an unusual interest can result in a deluge of further targeted marketing that may be unwelcome. Law enforcement, counter terrorism and espionage agencies can also identify, target and track individuals based on what appear to be their interests or proclivities on the web. Social networking sites make a point of trying to get the user to truthfully expose their real names, interests and locations. This makes the social networking experience more realistic and therefore engaging for all their users. On the other hand, photographs uploaded and unguarded statements made will be identified to the individual, who may regret some decisions to publish these data. Employers, schools, parents and other relatives may be influenced by aspects of social networking profiles that the posting individual did not intend for these audiences. On-line bullies may make use of personal information to harass or stalk users. Modern social networking websites allow fine grained control of the privacy settings for each individual posting, but these can be complex and not easy to find or use, especially for beginners.[35] Photographs and videos posted onto websites have caused particular problems, as they can add a person's face to an on-line profile. With modern and potential facial recognition technology, it may then be possible to relate that face with other, previously anonymous, images, events and scenarios that have been imaged elsewhere. Because of image caching, mirroring and straightforward copying, it is difficult to imagine that an image, once published onto the World Wide Web, can ever actually or totally be removed.

[edit]Intellectual

property

Main article: Intellectual property The intellectual property rights for any creative work initially rests with its creator. Web users who want to publish their work onto the World Wide Web, however, need to be aware of the details of the way they do it. If artwork, photographs, writings, poems, or technical innovations are published by their creator onto a privately owned web server, then they may choose the copyright and other conditions freely themselves. This is unusual though; more commonly work is uploaded to web sites and servers that are owned by other organisations. It depends upon the terms and conditions of the site or service

provider to what extent the original owner automatically signs over rights to their work by the choice of destination and by the act of uploading. Many users of the web erroneously assume that everything they may find on line is freely available to them as if it was in the public domain. This is almost never the case, unless the web site publishing the work clearly states that it is. On the other hand, content owners are aware of this widespread belief, and expect that sooner or later almost everything that is published will probably be used in some capacity somewhere without their permission. Many publishers therefore embed visible or invisible digital watermarks in their media files, sometimes charging users to receive unmarked copies for legitimate use. Digital rights management includes forms of access control technology that further limit the use of digital content even after it has been bought or downloaded.

[edit]Security
The Web has become criminals' preferred pathway for spreading malware. Cybercrime carried out on the Web can include identity theft, fraud, espionage and intelligence gathering.[36] Webbased vulnerabilities now outnumber traditional computer security concerns,[37][38] and as measured by Google, about one in ten web pages may contain malicious code.[39] Most Web-based attacks take place on legitimate websites, and most, as measured by Sophos, are hosted in the United States, China and Russia.[40] The most common of all malware threats is SQL injection attacks against websites.[41] Through HTML and URIs the Web was vulnerable to attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS) that came with the introduction of JavaScript[42] and were exacerbated to some degree by Web 2.0 and Ajax web design that favors the use of scripts.[43] Today by one estimate, 70% of all websites are open to XSS attacks on their users.[44] Proposed solutions vary to extremes. Large security vendors like McAfee already design governance and compliance suites to meet post-9/11 regulations,[45] and some, like Finjanhave recommended active real-time inspection of code and all content regardless of its source.[36] Some have argued that for enterprise to see security as a business opportunity rather than a cost center,[46] "ubiquitous, always-on digital rights management" enforced in the infrastructure by a handful of organizations must replace the hundreds of companies that today secure data and networks.[47] Jonathan Zittrain has said users sharing responsibility for computing safety is far preferable to locking down the Internet. [48]

[edit]Standards
Main article: Web standards Many formal standards and other technical specifications and software define the operation of different aspects of the World Wide Web, the Internet, and computer information exchange. Many of the documents are the work of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed by Berners-Lee, but some are produced by the Internet Engineering Task Force(IETF) and other organizations.

Usually, when web standards are discussed, the following publications are seen as foundational:

Recommendations for markup languages, especially HTML and XHTML, from the W3C. These define the structure and interpretation of hypertext documents.

Recommendations for stylesheets, especially CSS, from the W3C. Standards for ECMAScript (usually in the form of JavaScript), from Ecma International. Recommendations for the Document Object Model, from W3C.

Additional publications provide definitions of other essential technologies for the World Wide Web, including, but not limited to, the following:

Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), which is a universal system for referencing resources on the Internet, such as hypertext documents and images. URIs, often called URLs, are defined by the IETF's RFC 3986 / STD 66: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax, as well as its predecessors and numerous URI scheme-defining RFCs;

HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), especially as defined by RFC 2616: HTTP/1.1 and RFC 2617: HTTP Authentication, which specify how the browser and server authenticate each other.

[edit]Accessibility
Main article: Web accessibility There are methods available for accessing the web in alternative mediums and formats, so as to enable use by individuals with disabilities. These disabilities may be visual, auditory, physical, speech related, cognitive, neurological, or some combination therin. Accessibility features also help others with temporary disabilities like a broken arm or the aging population as their abilities change. [49] The Web is used for receiving information as well as providing information and interacting with society. The World Wide Web Consortium claims it essential that the Web be accessible in order to provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with disabilities.[50] Tim Berners-Lee once noted, "The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." [49] Many countries regulate web accessibility as a requirement for websites.[51] International cooperation in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative led to simple guidelines that web content authors as well as software developers can use to make the Web accessible to persons who may or may not be using assistive technology.[49][52]

[edit]Internationalization
The W3C Internationalization Activity assures that web technology will work in all languages, scripts, and cultures.[53] Beginning in 2004 or 2005, Unicode gained ground and eventually in December 2007 surpassed both ASCII and Western European as the Web's most frequently used character encoding.[54] Originally RFC 3986 allowed resources to be identified by URI in a subset of US-

ASCII. RFC 3987 allows more charactersany character in the Universal Character Setand now a resource can be identified by IRI in any language.[55]

[edit]Statistics
Between 2005 and 2010, the number of Web users doubled, and was expected to surpass two billion in 2010.[56] Early studies in 1998 and 1999 estimating the size of the web using capture/recapture methods showed that much of the web was not indexed by search engines and the web was much larger than expected.[57][58] According to a 2001 study, there were a massive number, over 550 billion, of documents on the Web, mostly in the invisible Web, or Deep Web.[59] A 2002 survey of 2,024 million Web pages[60] determined that by far the most Web content was in English: 56.4%; next were pages in German (7.7%), French (5.6%), and Japanese (4.9%). A more recent study, which used Web searches in 75 different languages to sample the Web, determined that there were over 11.5 billion Web pages in the publicly indexable Web as of the end of January 2005.[61] As of March 2009, the indexable web contains at least 25.21 billion pages.[62] On 25 July 2008, Google software engineers Jesse Alpert and Nissan Hajaj announced that Google Search had discovered one trillion unique URLs.[63] As of May 2009, over 109.5 million domains operated.[64][not in citation given] Of these 74% were commercial or other sites operating in the .com generic top-level domain.[64] Statistics measuring a website's popularity are usually based either on the number of page views or on associated server 'hits' (file requests) that it receives.

[edit]Speed

issues

Frustration over congestion issues in the Internet infrastructure and the high latency that results in slow browsing has led to a pejorative name for the World Wide Web: the World Wide Wait.[65] Speeding up the Internet is an ongoing discussion over the use of peering and QoS technologies. Other solutions to reduce the congestion can be found at W3C.[66]Guidelines for Web response times are:[67]

0.1 second (one tenth of a second). Ideal response time. The user does not sense any interruption. 1 second. Highest acceptable response time. Download times above 1 second interrupt the user experience.

10 seconds. Unacceptable response time. The user experience is interrupted and the user is likely to leave the site or system.

[edit]Caching
Main article: Web cache If a user revisits a Web page after only a short interval, the page data may not need to be re-obtained from the source Web server. Almost all web browsers cache recently obtained data, usually on the local hard drive. HTTP requests sent by a browser will usually ask only for data that has changed since the last download. If the locally cached data are still current, they will be reused. Caching helps reduce the

amount of Web traffic on the Internet. The decision about expiration is made independently for each downloaded file, whether image, stylesheet, JavaScript, HTML, or other resource. Thus even on sites with highly dynamic content, many of the basic resources need to be refreshed only occasionally. Web site designers find it worthwhile to collate resources such as CSS data and JavaScript into a few sitewide files so that they can be cached efficiently. This helps reduce page download times and lowers demands on the Web server. There are other components of the Internet that can cache Web content. Corporate and academic firewalls often cache Web resources requested by one user for the benefit of all. (See also caching proxy server.) Some search engines also store cached content from websites. Apart from the facilities built into Web servers that can determine when files have been updated and so need to be re-sent, designers of dynamically generated Web pages can control the HTTP headers sent back to requesting users, so that transient or sensitive pages are not cached. Internet banking and news sites frequently use this facility. Data requested with an HTTP 'GET' is likely to be cached if other conditions are met; data obtained in response to a 'POST' is assumed to depend on the data that was POSTed and so is not cached.

The importance of the World-Wide Web

3.1. Alternatives to the World Wide Web 3.2. Using World-Wide Web for authoring or delivery

The World-Wide Web (also known as WWW or just the Web) is the provision of independent distributed servers which can work together and link together is a seamless way. The protocol each of these servers use is defined as the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to transmit documents in the HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML). HTML allows documents to contain formatting information and links to other media such as graphics, audio and video. The free distribution of descriptions [9], [10] of this mark-up language and information about how to construct servers and clients to display the information has led to a very large number of sites implementing and using this approach. Public domain implementations of the HTTP servers are available from several sites and for several platforms so that servers can be run from UNIX systems, PCs and Apple Macintoshes. The client software to allow access to servers over the network and the display of the retrieved HTML documents is also available for these platforms and others. In addition for each of the platforms there is a growing choice of client program. This is encouraging for the long term future of the Web approach to providing information, as it seems likely that free clients

and servers will continue to be available even as commercial systems start to appear[11]. In addition to supporting documents written in HTML for the WWW clients, the Web offers access to other information services. Allowing access by clients to other servers means that information already being made available on existing gopher and ftp sites can be immediately integrated. A further feature of the Web is that access is possible to any program on the server. This allows easy extension of the WWW system to specialised areas such as database access, on line information gathering and security checking. 3.1. Alternatives to the World Wide Web The World-Wide Web has now established itself as one of the fastest growing technologies in the computer world. The Web and its protocols and display clients offer advantages over earlier systems such asgopher in the way in which they support structured documents and linking across different servers. However the existing system does have some weaknesses. In particular communication between the server and the client is not built into the design. Each connection with the server is a new connection and can not be simply matched up to an earlier connection. Software authored for local delivery can also take advantage of additional facilities and produce systems that are easier to use then those currently possible using the web. This may change with later versions of servers, clients and protocols. In addition some alternatives are becoming available, for example the Hyper-G system [12] which offers similar facilities but has additional features to allow greater integration between clients and servers and identification of users. 3.2. Using World-Wide Web for authoring or delivery The facilities for authoring in the World-Wide Web have not been very sophisticated. HTML documents are basically plain text with mark-up indication (for example <h1>A Heading</h1> is an HTML sequence to define that text as being a level 1 heading). This means that any editor can be used to create the HTML documents. Tools are now appearing to help with this task, either sets of word processing macros (e.g. CU-HTML) or custom programs (e.g. HoTMetaL). There are now a variety of these to help in the authoring task, particularly in the creation of valid HTML documents. The Web approach to authoring documents is not as sophisticated as that used in typical authoring tools (such as those discussed in [13]). This is partly because of the need for further development of the tools to assist the creation of the documents and also the need to introduce further features into the servers and client, for example tables, pop-up windows and in-line video. Some of these

features are planned for future releases such as HTML2 and HTML3 [14]. There is though a fundamental difference between the client-server approach of the Web and most other authoring approaches. On the Web it is under the control of the client how things are expected to appear on the screen. For example one client may choose to render a level 1 header in black bold Helvetica font at size 32point, while another may render it as blue italic Times-Roman size 12point. These local decisions mean that it is difficult to ensure that a given document appears as intended by the designer, the designer also can not predetermine the delays that will be imposed by using a remote server. This variation in appearance and interaction response times is not a problem for many uses of the Web where the underlying information is what is important, but where the design has been made to ensure usability these changes can hinder the use of learning material. In practice many Web pages have been designed on assumptions based on the use of the most common client with its default settings. Some control can be regained by using active graphic maps [9] in place of text but the current implementation of these does not allow adequate feedback and response times become even more dependent on the network performance. The majority of courseware has been produced for delivery to local machines using authoring systems targeted at those machines and for the reasons outlined above this is likely to continue to be the case. The role of a courseware server then can be to deliver this material in a simple and flexible manner. As the separate strand of courseware developed for the Web (and similar technologies) develops and becomes established this will be able to be served alongside the more conventional packages.

, up , TitleTECHNOLOGY

HOW WWW WORKS The way the Web works is quite simple. It takes place in four basic phases: connection, request, response, and close. First, the user can use the browser (like Netscape or Microsoft Internet Explorer) to connect with the server. The browser works by using a special protocol, which is called HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) to request a specially encoded text from the web server. The text is written in HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), which tells the browser how to display the text on the users screen. HTTP is not the only protocol that the WWW browsers know. One can also use ftp, gopher, wais, telnet and archie to command the server to search for the information desired. Web pages are written in HTML. Everyone can learn the HTML easily to write his or her own homepages. A simple example of HTML is as follows: <H1>, which means the

page heading. The commands are enclosed in angle bracket. On top of all of these technical definitions, one of the important terms one should know is the URLs (UNIFORM RESOURSE LOCATORS), an Internet address. A URL consists of four parts. These parts are the protocol, domain name, path, and filename. For example: a completed URL might look like this: http://home.mcom.com/home/internetsearch.html. With the help of the URL, a user is able to find the information one wants more efficiently. The most important feature of the web is the hypertext system, which allows a user to move from document to document without knowing the address of specific web sites. For example, the text on the screen will have some highlighted spots. One needs only to click the mouse, and the information will be pulled to the screen in a few seconds. APPLICATION The Web can be used for multiple purposes. One of the original purposes of the Web was to disseminate research for academic use. However, according to the WWW User Surveys conducted by GVU (Graphics, Visualization, and Usability), the main use of the Web is for entertainment purposes. Additionally, Web shopping increases gradually year by year. Other than dissemination of research and ordering products, the Web can also be used for client and customer support. For example, when one visits the homepage of the Motorola company, a user can find not just the information of its products, but also the answers to frequently asked questions and technical information, etc. There are still other uses that the World Wide Web can offer, like Web TV and Distance Education. Once a user understands how to use the Web, universal Web information can be reached. BUSINESS As of mid-1998, the hottest issue related to the World Wide Web is the browsers war between the Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape. Although the browser statistics for the random Yahoo link shows that people like to use Netscape more than Microsoft Explorer, Netscape still undergoes fierce threat from Microsoft. Microsoft has unfairly gained market by giving its Internet Explorer a shared place with its dominant Windows 95 operating system software. Netscape is planning to release a browser source code in order to encourage people to use it. This issue is related to the antitrust law, which may be very intricately related to the policy of the government. The World Wide Web is the largest source of network traffic around the world; its revenue is huge, and the impact the Web has brought to the software industries, arousing fierce competition among them cannot be ignored. Approximately 7 million people worldwide have access to the Web, demonstrating its importance. If one desires to connect the Internet through the telephone company, there is

approximately a $20 monthly fee. This cost is one of the important factors which will affect the willingness of a user to use the Internet. DRIVING FORCES THE WORLD BRIDGE The rapid growth of the Web can be contributed to its simple usage, which benefits numerous users who have neither patience nor interest to learn the complicated commands of the computer. From the users point of view, the Web is easy to manipulate, even for the computer-illiterate. One can simply find the information desired by clicking the mouse, and getting the information around the world without leaving home. Besides gaining its popularity among the users, the Web is also popular in the business field. Many companies have their own web sites in order to promote their products or services to customers. The Web has become an important market, which cannot be ignored, since there are approximately 7 million people worldwide who have access to the Web. Using the Web to promote ones product saves comparatively more money than using TV or other advertising methods POLICY There are many public policy issues in related to the Web, like censorship, Intellectual Property, Copyright Infringement, and Encryption. All of these issues are hard to resolve. In order to solve these problems, many organizations and international conferences were held. For example, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) held a conference in December 1996 in order to find a way to protect the copyright. OPPORTUNITIES, PROBLEMS, AND PROSPECTS THE FUTURE The future of the Web seems to be very bright. It might continue to converge with the TV and many other multimedia, offering more functions for the users, like live interactive entertainment, in which audience members can participate in dramas or other programs on the Web, possibly influencing the outcome or joining the game. The Web can be used for voting in the presidential elections, and distant education could become more popular in the future. THE PROBLEM The most important issues now the Web facing are the problems of the privacy and censorship. In addition to fears of using ones credit card to purchase

products on the Web, the Web users also face the threat of the cookie, which will violate their privacy. The effect of the cookie is similar to Caller ID on telephones. Whenever one visits a web site, the web server sends a cookie to a users computer, which is stored in the users hard drive. By retrieving the cookie, which was previously left, people will know a users visiting habits and preferences. Hence, many view this as a violation of privacy. In order to keep ones privacy, one can use cookie crusher to let the web server know not to send cookies to particular users. As for Web censorship, it is a big problem in the Internet world. The World Wide Web consortium has developed a technical standard, called PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection). It can help parents to control what children can access on the Internet. However, it still waits to be fully resolved in the future.

EXAMPLES OF EDUCATIONAL USES OF THE WWW

Several currently available sites are listed below to illustrate examples of educational uses of the World Wide Web. The following are examples of interesting learning environments, some virtual and some real. Some museums are providing multimedia views of some of the classics (e.g., art and music), and even some scenery such as in WebMuseum. This site has become so popular that it now has a whole network of coordinated sites around the world to allow for quicker and more readily available responses. This site allows for a visit to various areas of Paris, France, including the Louvre, to see many famous paintings and medieval art, an auditorium with music from many of the classics as well as some modern multimedia, and includes a tour of Paris with accompanying history. Elementary teachers often like to use a thematic approach to an integrated curriculum. For example, studying the history of toys could provide an integrative topic that could open many doors such as looking at toys as a view into the society at the time--hence, opening doors to the history of a society. Experimentation of the functioning of some of the toys can open the door to mathematics and science. See theHistory of Wooden Toys. This thematic approach can continue the history of toys theme to outdoor toys. See Outdoors Games. Other areas that hold the potential to develop such integrative topics include the following. Life over time is the current focus of The Field Museum in Chicago, including dinosaurs and support teacher's guides. See the Dna to Dinosaurs Exhibit.

Imagine studying geography and or history by examining a map and using point and click approaches to go to a location and then learning about the history, culture, current attractions, and perhaps seeing pictures of the current area and so on. Virtual Tourist and Virtual Tourist II provide adventure throughout the world. Go to the world map and click on the area you would like to visit and study. Two places suggest virtual cities. Through such activities students' imaginations can become engaged. How about building a city in cyberspace where the constructors design or build cities in space? For example, see CitySpace and Garage Logic. According to one of CitySpace's creators, Zane Vella (1995), CitySpace participants DO see what the others are doing, and in fact the purpose of the project is to provide a context for ongoing exchange, creation, and debate among students. Dialog among participants across the internet (mail, cu-see me, and much ftp) centers around placement, scale, and orientation of new additions to CitySpace, as well as more value-laden choices such as what to build next (casino, skatepark or school) as well as who gets "prime" real estate. It emphasizes the collaborative nature of the project before making use of the graphic. The JASON Project is a living working environment. Each year an expedition is taken and interactive downlink sites provide the ability for students to experience the expedition, operate the scientific equipment being used, and communicate directly with involved scientists at the actual expedition site. The project provides teacher training and curriculum designed to particularly highlight science, technology, engineering, and social studies involved in that year's expedition. Current events can provide many educational experiences. For example, visit CNN Newsroom, the Pathfinder the Nando Times, or see the Astronauts to learn who was doing what and so on. Also check out the trial of the century, O. J. Simpson's Trial. Furthermore, pictures started coming out of Kobe, Japan shortly after their disastrous earthquake. Pictures, lists of people in hospitals, and lists of fatalities came within a few days from the (see Oklahoma City Explosion). Considerable organization is in process to help people find materials. For example, a lot of time has gone into construction of theCyberspace Middle School, which builds pointers to a number of sources for students as well as teachers. The Web 66: WWW School Registry allows schools to see and learn about other schools on the WWW. As of this writing, 139 elementary schools, representing 31 states and 9 countries, and 251 secondary schools including middle and high schools, representing 41 states and the District of Columbia and 10 countries are included in the Registry. Table 1 shows the distribution of schools by level and number of schools, number of

states represented in the United States, and number of countries. Countries include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Turkey, United Kingdom, Virgin Islands, and, of course, the United States
Level of School Elementary School No. of Schools No. of States in USA No. of Countries 139 31 25 39 9 3 10

Middle School/Junior High School* 50 High School* 205

*Note: Four schools were listed as a combined middle or junior high school and high school. The Kids on the Web provides a number of experiences for students. A number of materials are listed in Internet Resources for the K-12 Classroom. Organization of Children's Literature can be helpful in locating and keep up to date with the numerous children's books being published. In some cases the organization of the WWW is very graphic, making full use of the point and click technology. For example, the Subway out of Berkeley shows some of the critical areas. Students can learn more about our government by visiting the White House and/or seeing the text of bills and useful information about Congress at THOMAS: Legislative Information on the Internet. Perhaps making the White House more approachable than ever before, there is now a guest book for which people can send comments. Students can explore government sites, thus making the government much more real to them. Furthermore, such connections can, in fact, make the government much more "for the people" and "by the people" through such direct connections. Some sites are focusing on developing intellectual skills, such as problem solving and critical thinking (e.g., Odyssey of the Mind, 21st Century Problem Solving, and Swarthmore's Geometry Form--creator of Geometer's Sketchpad. Some sites are emphasizing visualization such as the CoVis Project at Northwestern, Mathematical visualization, and Interactive OnLine Geometry. These are but a sampling of materials currently available at the time of this writing. The World Wide Web is still in its infancy, and I anticipate that many other excellent materials will evolve. I plan to keep an active home page myself to use with my own students.

Return to Top

ON THE DOWN SIDE

While I feel that there is much educational potential for the World Wide Web, there are some concerns that need to be acknowledged. For one thing there currently is no censorship, which means that students can access some inappropriate material. Congress is currently examining this. A second concern is that at present there is no systematic information system--much like a major city with everyone having a telephone number, but no one having a telephone book or directory assistance. Hence, it becomes a major challenge to locate materials. At the same time many people are building pointers to their favorite links, and I believe ultimately good reference materials will evolve. Another potential problem is that, since this is an on-line service and can be updated in a minute, it provides a dynamic process of updating and modifying materials regularly. However, since a number of people move or relocate their addresses, an active address one week may lead to a blind alley the next. These problems will ultimately be resolved if enough people see them as problems and work together in order to provide uniform standards. However, the potential gains far outweigh these problems, and I hope people will work together to resolve them. Return to Top

FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Technologically, the capabilities will continue to grow. The use of fiber optics and faster and more capable communications--through cable, telephone, and digital satellite systems-will continue to expand. At present with high speed modems and higher level microcomputers, text, graphics, and photos are being transmitted in real time. Sound and video are being transmitted in a download form. As fiber optics become the standard, perhaps video and sound will become more viewable in real time, as well as moving more to interactive video and sound. Some school systems are aggressively moving to take advantage of the World Wide Web. For example, in Florida, FIRN (Florida Information Resource Network), a statewide network, has already been established for linking educators throughout the state. That network is now being upgraded so that people can take full advantage of the World Wide Web. Within the next few months, WWW will be available to school systems throughout the state. It is then up to the school systems to make it available to individual classrooms through upgrading the wiring and getting appropriate hardware and software. Education holds the potential for empowering students and teachers. I often tell teachers that they must deal with technology because the "haves" will get it in spite of or because of the schools and the "have nots" will become farther behind without schools becoming proactive.

Many aspects of life hold the potential of being affected by the growth and availability of the World Wide Web. Already many commercial companies, educational institutions, government agencies, and organizations are opening sites on the WWW. Some schools have already established sites on the WWW as well, and more will follow. Growth is occurring quite rapidly. I suspect that the World Wide Web could not be stopped at this point even if anyone wanted to. WWW holds the potential of providing a very open approach to education where students no longer are dependent upon their teacher or a textbook as their sole source of information. Students may learn a variety of topics in a number of ways. A social environment is provided by the society of the world or in a small related study or newsgroup, either of which is not necessarily restricted by a geographic region. WWW also holds the potential of raising the standards of education.

Email
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the communications medium. For the former manufacturing conglomerate, see Email Limited.

The at sign, a part of every SMTP email address[1]

Electronic mail, also known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-andforward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages. Historically, the term electronic mail was used generically for any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to describe fax document transmission.[2][3] As a result, it is difficult to find the first citation for the use of the term with the more specific meaning it has today. An Internet email message[NB 1] consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including,

minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp. Originally a text-only (7-bit ASCII and others) communications medium, email was extended to carry multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet, and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it,[4] but the history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the earlyARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a basic text message sent on the Internet today. Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself.

Importance of the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web contributes greatly to the creation of an ever-increasing global information database. Thus its importance can not be over-emphasized. Its importance includes: the ability to easily deliver information in any format, to/from a wide range of computing platforms. On the Web information can be accessed from many diverse sources - competitors, customers, technology providers, international universities, financial institutions, and many other places. This information is on many different computing platforms. The mechanisms of the Web insulate us from needing

to know or deal with this - it takes care of getting, moving and presenting the information we need. In addition to information from external sources, it could also be used as a mechanism to share information within an enterprise. Several large companies have hundreds of internal servers, and the number is growing rapidly. More about this is at Intranet Resource Centre. Its' provides a client-server environment. Web browsers provide a tested client upon which more organizations are building (or converting) client-server applications. Testing time is greatly reduced, and the application will be available on many platforms with no extra effort. See this paper ("Building HTML Application Systems: Converting Existing MS-Windows Applications to HTML" by CDC's Robert Thralls) for an example - they claim to have cut development and testing time to 10% of what it used to be!.) It has Simplified access to the Internet. The Internet provides access to mail, interactive conferences, network news, and is rich with information resources....but the Internet can be difficult to use and understand. The World Wide Web makes it easier to use the Internet:
It provides a graphical interface (on many platforms) It supports multimedia (sound, video, as well as graphics) It uses the same tools as the Internet, but hides the ugly details It is based on standards/conventions, so sharing is much easier than before All this makes it easier to access information And makes it easier to provide information, also

It provides access to the wide and rapidly growing amount of information available.

The volume of information available is huge and growing rapidly. Many of the world's major companies, universities and research organizations are on the Web today, with many others joining daily. The Internet is growing at a phenomenal rate (no one knows exactly how big it is, but as of May 25, 1996 Internet Solutions estimated there were 59,628,024 people on the Internet, and an estimated 304,177 World Wide Web sites on the Internet.