The World Wide Web
The World-Wide-Web, often called the "Web", is a collection of electronic documents that contain text, pictures, and even sound and video. This is the portion of the Internet that has attracted much attention. The Web is undergoing explosive growth because of its capacity to perform as a new medium for communication. No description could possibly exhaust all the millions of things the Internet could possibly offer. Simply, the Web is the first true universal database.

The World Wide Web is changing the way people communicate all over the globe. This new global medium is gaining popular acceptance faster than any other communications medium in history. Over the last two years, the web has grown to include a vast array of information -- everything from stock quotes to job opportunities, bulletin boards to news, previews of movies, literary reviews, and games. The type of information ranges from the most obscure to the most globally important. People often talk about "surfing" the web and visiting new sites. "Surfing" means following hyperlinks to pages and subjects you may never have heard about, meeting new people, visiting new places, and learning about things from all over the world. Remember, the Internet is not just about corporate information. Because it is very easy to publish on the web, many individuals have set up personal "home pages," pages about themselves and their interests, pictures of themselves, and more. Some even have pointers to what they are wearing in the office that day or their pet.

The Basics

You can think of the World Wide Web as a big library on the Internet. Web "sites" are like the books in the library and web "pages" are like specific pages in the books. A collection of web pages is known as a web site. You start your journey through the web from a particular web site. A "home page" is the starting point for a web site. It is something like the cover page or the Table of Contents of a book. Each web page, including a web site's home page, has a unique address called a Universal Resource Locator (URL). This page's address is "/cybercity/internet/internet.html." A "browser" is a software tool that you use to look at web pages. You are using a browser right now to look at this page.
      

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