What is the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW or ``The Web'' is a distributed hypermedia database. The components that go to make up WWW include:

• Clients - These are the tools the user runs, known as browsers, to access information stored on the servers. An example of simple text-mode client is Lynx; of Graphical User Interface clients are Mosaic and Netscape.
• Servers - These run on machines permanently connected to the Internet, and store the data users place there. Examples of servers are the NCSA and the CERN daemons.
• An Access Protocol - This is what clients use to request information from the servers and is called the Hypertext Transfer Protocol.
• A Markup Language with a hyper-link facility - It is the standard for describing the data and the connectivity between items of data in the Web. This is an extension to the Standardized General Markup Language (SGML) and is called the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML).

Of course, it is possible to run all this technology on a private network, and have a private WWW. However, the power and beauty of the Web in the Internet is the massive improvement in user-friendliness that it has bought to the hitherto thankless task of finding information in the world at large.

The Web is not, however, a panacea for information overload. Other tools provide other things that WWW does not. For example, WAIS (the Wide Area Information Service, based on the library access protocol, Z39.50) permits intelligent indexes and searching of databases. Where the Web really wins is that it is extensible both in the access protocol, and at the servers, so that gateways from the Web into other information services such as WAIS, gopher, FTP and so on can be accessed from Web clients transparently.