Many people think that the? Web and the Internet are the same, but they are not. The Internet is the foundation the Web is built upon.
The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers. These interconnected computers are able to share data (information), however not all the data on the Internet is available via the Web. When you get online with your computer, you become part of the Internet, i.e. your computer becomes one of the interconnected computers on the Internet.
The World Wide Web is a system of interconnected servers (computers) that support specially formatted documents (web pages) that contain HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language), and hyperlinks. The key elements here are the markup of the documents and the linking within the text and graphics. When clicked upon, these links (hyperlinks) give a user immediate access to additional web pages and multi-media items such as image, video and audio files.
Software applications called ?browsers? enable us to access the information on the Web. Two of the most popular browsers are Internet Explorer (Microsoft), and FireFox (Mozilla). Other browsers commonly used are Safari (Apple), Opera and most recently, Chrome (Google).
It is the specially formatted documents, the linking within them, and the related files, all accessible via a browser, that make up the World Wide Web.
In a nutshell, without the Web the Internet would still exist, without the Internet the Web could not exist.
Stay tuned for our next post where I will talk about websites and how they work.
