WWW (also called as Web) is a large scale, online store of information. It is a system of creating, organizing, and linking of documents. Information is stored on WWW as a collection of documents that are interconnected with each other via links. The interconnected documents may be located on one or more than one computer, worldwide, thus, the name world wide web. The features of WWW and terms linked to WWW are given below—
• The documents on web are created in hypertext format. Hypertext facilitates linking of documents.
• The language used to create a hypertext format document is HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML allows the designer of the document to include text, pictures, video, images, sound, graphics, movies etc., and also to link contents on the same document or different documents using a hyperlink.
• The hypertext format document is transferred on the Web using HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
• A single hypertext document is called a Web page .
• A group of related web pages is called a Web site. A web site displays related information on a specific topic.
• The first web page or main page of a website is called Homepage.
• The web pages are stored on the Internet on the Web Server. Web servers are host computers that can store thousands of web pages.
• The process of storing a web page on a web server is called uploading.
• The process of retrieving a web page from a web server onto the user’s computer is downloading.
• The web pages stored on web server on the Internet, can be viewed from the user’s computer using a tool called Web browser.
• Every web page is identified on Internet by its address, also called Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
• A web portal is a web site that presents information from different sources and makes them available in a unified way . A web portal enables the user to search for any type of information from a single location, i.e. the home page of the web portal. A web portal generally consists of a search engine, e-mail service, news, advertisements, and an extensive list of links to other sites etc. www.msn.com and www.google.co.in (igoogle) are popular web portals.