Internet Terminology

There are several terms whose use are associated with the internet. To know more about the Internet, it is essential for us to have a definition of its basic terms

WHAT IS THE INTERNET?

"The Internet" refers to the worldwide network of interconnected computers, all of which use a common protocol known as TCP/IP to communicate with each other. Every publicly accessible web site is hosted by a web server computer, which is a part of the Internet. Every personal computer, cell phone or other device that people use to look at web sites is also a part of the Internet. The Internet also makes possible email, games and other applications unrelated to the World Wide Web.

WHAT IS THE WORLD WIDE WEB?

The term "World Wide Web" refers to all of the publicly accessible web sites in the world, in addition to other information sources that web browsers can access. These other sources include FTP sites, USENET newsgroups, and a few surviving Gopher sites. WWW is an acronym, which stands for World Wide Web.

WHAT IS A WEBPAGE?

Every web site is made up of one or more web pages -- like the one you are looking at right now! This text is part of a web page, and is written in the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). In addition to text with hyperlinks, tables, and other formatting, web pages can also contain images. Less commonly, web pages may contain Flash animations, Java applets, or MPEG video files.

WHAT IS A HOME PAGE

The "home page" of a web site is the page that is displayed if you simply type in the domain name of the site in the address bar of your browser and press enter. For instance, when you type in www.cnn.com and press enter in the address bar, you go to CNN's home page. "Home page" can also refer to a page that serves as the table of contents and logical starting point for any collection of web pages, such as the personal web pages of an individual, even if it is not actually the top-level home page for the domain name. Also sometimes referred to as a "homepage."

WHAT IS A URL?

Just imagine you open a website and on the address bar, you find something like http://theinternetismine.blogspot.com/…

This is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the web page you are looking at right now. A URL can be thought of as the "address" of a web page and is sometimes referred to informally as a "web address."

URLs are used to write links linking one page to another; for an example, see the HTML entry.

A URL is made up of several parts. The first part is the protocol, which tells the web browser what sort of server it will be talking to in order to fetch the URL. In this example, the protocol is http.

The remaining parts vary depending on the protocol, but the vast majority of URLs you will encounter use the http protocol; exceptions include file URLs, which link to local files on your own hard drive, ftp URLs, which work just like http URLs but link to things on FTP servers rather than web servers, and mailto URLs, which can be used to invite a user to write an email message to a particular email address.

The second part of the example URL above is the fully qualified domain name of the web site to connect to. In this case, the fully qualified domain name is www.boutell.com. This name identifies the web site containing the page. The term "fully qualified domain name" refers to a complete web site or other computer's name on the Internet. The term "domain name" usually refers only to the last part of the name, in this case boutell.com, which has been registered for that particular company's exclusive use. For more information about registering domain names, see the setting up web sites entry.

The third part of the example URL is the path at which this particular web page is located on the web server. In this case, the path is /newfaq/basic/url.html. Similar to a filename, a path usually indicates where the web page is located within the web space of the web site; in this case it is located in the basic sub-folder of the newfaq folder, which is located in the top-level web page directory of our web site.

WHAT IS A WEB BROWSER?

When you sit down and look at web pages, you are using a web browser. This is the piece of software that communicates with web servers for you via the HTTP protocol, translates HTML pages and image data into a nicely formatted on-screen display, and presents this information to your eyeballs -- or to your other senses, in the case of browsers for the vision-impaired and other alternative interface technologies. Web browsers also appear in simpler devices such as Internet-connected cell phones, like many Nokia models, and PDAs such as the Palm Pilot.

The most common web browser, by a large margin, is Microsoft Internet Explorer, followed by the open-source Mozilla browser and its derivatives, including Netscape 6.0 and later. Apple's new Safari browser is gaining popularity on Macintoshes running MacOS X, and the Opera shareware browser has a loyal following among those who are willing to pay for the fastest browser possible, especially on older computers. The Lynx browser is the most frequently used text-only browser and has been adapted to serve the needs of the vision-impaired.

WHAT IS A WEB SERVER?

Web servers are the computers that actually run web sites. The term "web server" also refers to the piece of software that runs on those computers, accepting HTTP connections from web browsers and delivering web pages and other files to them, as well as processing form submissions. The most common web server software is Apache, followed by Microsoft Internet Information server; many, many other web server programs also exist. For more information about web servers and how to arrange hosting for your own web pages, see the creating web sites section.

WHAT IS A HYPERLINK

Every time you click on a link on a web page, such as the link you may have clicked on to reach this page, you are following a hyperlink.

A hyperlink is a link you can click on or activate with the keyboard or other device in order to go somewhere else. A hyperlink is defined by its function, not by its appearance. What it looks or sounds or smells like is completely irrelevant except as a way of recognizing it. Visually impaired people follow hyperlinks with speech-based browsers and never see text at all. A hyperlink without a blue underline is still a hyperlink if your browser allows you to click on it or otherwise activate it to go somewhere else on the World Wide Web, or in another hypertext system.

WHAT IS HYPERTEXT

Hypertext is text that contains hyperlinks. The HTML and XHTML documents we see on the World Wide Web are the best-known example of a hypertext system, but it is not the only one. Hypertext doesn't necessarily have to include links to documents in other places; a simple hypertext system can live on a single computer, as in the case of Apple's once-common HyperCard application.

WHAT IS A DOMAIN NAME?

The term "domain name" usually refers to a particular organization's registered name on the Internet, such as example.com, boutell.com or udel.edu. There may be many distinct computers within a single domain, or there may be only one. The term "fully qualified domain name" refers to a complete web site or other computer's name on the Internet, such as www.boutell.com or ip2039.cleveland.myisp.com. The holder of a domain name may delegate almost any number of names within that domain, such as www1.example.com, www2.example.com, whimsical.example.com, and so on.

Registered domain names are themselves part of a "top-level domain." Examples of top level domains are .com, .edu, .mx, .fr and so on.

WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE?

Since no one is in charge of the Web as a whole, there is a business opportunity for anyone to create an index of its contents and an interface for searching that index. Such interfaces are known as search engines. Typically the user will type in a few words that relate to what he or she is looking for and click a search button, at which point the search engine will present a links to web pages which are, hopefully, relevant to that search.

While some early indexes of the web were created by hand, modern search engines rely on automated exploring, or "spidering," of the web by specialized web browsing programs.

Yours truly,
Ferdinand Che.