The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (referred to as just the Web or WWW) can be considered to be an application that works over the Internet, leveraging the computing devices connected to the global network. However, since it was set up circa 1990, it has grown so much in terms of its capability and usage, and integrated so tightly with the Internet, that the two systems are often considered to be the same.

In reality, the Internet refers to the global network of computing devices that use several networking protocols (such as TCP/IP) to communicate with each other, while the World Wide Web is an application that uses application protocols (such as HTTP) to serve content from a server to a client. Other applications also work over the Internet, although they are not as popular as the Web.

The Web started as a relatively simple solution to share content in multiple formats, including text documents, images, videos, and audio. The Web uses a client-server architecture. The client is referred to as a Web Browser, which runs on the user's computer or smartphone. The server is referred to as a Web Server and hosts the content. The text that is requested by the browser and sent by the server is known as Hypertext.

HyperText has a concept of hyperlinks, that link multiple hypertext documents. Hypermedia is a term used for content other than text, including images, video, and audio. The World Wide Web is a collection of hypermedia.