Web exploration trip | part one: what is the Web?

The author is Xie Enming, an official account of Programmer Union (wechat id: CoderHub). Please indicate the source of reprint. Original: www.jianshu.com/p/29f2ea410…

The whole Web Quest series

Content abstract

What is the Web?
Web, services and cloud
The birth of the Web
conclusion
Part 2 Lesson 1 Notice

1. What is Web?

What is the Web? The question is not easy to answer.

The English word Web has several meanings: “Web, Web, Web; The world wide web. Fabric; Trap “.

We also often use the compound word Webpage, like Webpage. Is a combination of Web and Page (Page means “page”), Website. Is a blend of Web and site.

Usually in the FIELD of IT (an abbreviation for Information Technology), Web is translated as “Web,” or a lot of times we just use the word Web without translating. Because the word network (or net for short) also means “network.” But there is a difference between Web and network.

So what is the Web?

In IT, Web is short for the World Wide Web, commonly known as WWW. The World is Wide and the Web is Wide.

The WWW allows Web clients (such as our common browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox, and so on) to access pages on the Web server. Is a system of many interconnected hypertexts, accessed via the Internet.

In this system, every useful thing is called a “Resource” and is identified by a URI (short for Uniform Resource Identifier).

These resources use HTTP (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol). The HTTP protocol is delivered to the user, who clicks on the link to retrieve the resource.

The Web is an application-layer concept. It can be said that network is the underlying foundation of our broadest concept of “network”, while the Web refers to top-level applications, including even human interaction using the Web.

Representation of the Web

What’s a good word to describe the Web?

Some people might think of surfing, or surfing the Internet/Web. Because when we’re on a website, we kind of surf through pages.

I can’t help but think of tenger singing the end of the TV drama kangxi Dynasty song big Man: “Life has a kind of sea of courage, the years turn over pages ruthlessly.” We also often ruthlessly flip through our web pages and even our lives.

But when it comes to the Web, let’s use another image.

I chose to use the word “spider Web” to represent the Web visually:

Why, forgive those of you who are afraid of spiders, is it a spider web?

Because the Web in English has “spider Web” meaning, and the spider Web each connected node, just can represent the world in this big Web every computer. Once they’re online, these computers are connected to each other on the Web.

2. Web, services and cloud

In this section, we’ll start by differentiating between the Internet and the Web, two concepts that are often confused.

We have to say to you, “The Internet is not the Web!”

The Web is part of the Internet, although the Web is the best known part of the Internet as a service.

As we can see in the figure above, the Internet is made up of Web and other services.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a vast network of networks connected by a common set of protocols to form a single, logically large international network.

This method of connecting computer networks to each other is called “network interconnection”. On this basis, a global network covering the whole world has been developed, called the Internet, which is a network structure connected with each other.

In addition to the Web, the Internet contains other services:

-Penny: E-mail.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol.
Newsgroups: Newsgroups. The name itself is somewhat ambiguous, as it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically completely different from forums (BBS) on the World Wide Web, but they are functionally similar. A newsgroup, usually using the NNTP protocol, which uses a specific client to read and send discussion content, is an electronic discussion group that aggregates articles published by people who have a common interest in a topic.
Other services: Remote login (Telnet), BBS (forum), etc.

Today, people sometimes confuse the Internet with the Web because more and more Internet services (E-mail, FTP, newsgroups, etc.) are presented to users through the Web interface. Many of these services are already integrated into the Web.

Some examples:

Gmail: Google’s free webmail service that interacts with users over the Web. Most of us use Gmail in the browser. In fact, E-mail, an Internet service, is presented on the Web.
Dropbox is a popular online storage service. Later, China also out of baidu cloud disk, 360 network disk, and many other network disk, are to imitate Dropbox. FTP is an Internet service that is rendered on the Web.

There are other things, I won’t list them all.

Cloud (Cloud)

The differences between the Internet and the Web were explained, and some common Internet services were introduced. Let’s look at another popular concept: Cloud. You’ve probably heard of “Cloud computing”, “big data” and so on.

When it comes to the definition of Cloud, there is no unified view so far. There are different explanations.

We can simply define Cloud as Internet services that are available through the “interface” of the Web, or the services themselves as “clouds.”

It can be graphically represented by the following figure:

The various services represented by the clouds in the image above are those that we users access through the Web interface. These services include:

File Storage: File Storage. Such as Google Drive, Baidu Cloud disk, cloud storage, and so on.
Computing power: Cloud computing, for example.
Paperless: Paperless is an information revolution in the form of avoiding the use of paper as a media for recording and communication, saving resources and sustainable development. Paperless interpersonal communication: email, SMS, online discussion area, instead of writing love letters, letters, complaints, etc. Official documents: Word, PDF and other computerized, network transmission, delivered to the recipient, to be necessary by the reader’s own printing, etc.
Other services.

Of course, what we generally call the cloud or cloud computing is more complicated, and there are several types. Such as:

SaaS (Software as a Service).
IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).
PaaS (Platform as a Service).
And so on.

If you’re interested, follow up.

3. The Birth of the Web

Let’s take a look at the history of the Web and see how this interesting Web was born and developed.

Let’s give a brief introduction:

ARPAnet: A prototype called the Internet. In 1969, the Advance Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, began building a network called ARPAnet. The purpose of the network was to build a computer network for military needs, and when one part of the network was destroyed, the rest of the network quickly established new connections. There was also the threat of nuclear attack, not to forget that this was during the Cold War (1947-1991). The United States needed to defend itself against a Soviet surprise attack. If, say, that part of the network in New York was bombed, the rest of the computer network had to still work.

The picture above shows ARPAnet across the United States at the time.

Services such as E-mail began to appear on the Internet: in 1972, E-mail services appeared.
The Advent of the Web: 1991. So the Web was born long after the Internet.

Tim Berbers Lee, the father of the Web

So who invented the Web?

Tim Berbers Lee, who’s down here, looks kind of nice. In 1991 (or 1989…) The Web (short for World Wide Web, or WWW) was introduced.

This photo was actually taken in 1994 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Before him, there were no browsers, no WWW, nothing online. If Tim had taken out intellectual property rights and patents on his idea for the WWW and later the World Wide Web for his own personal gain, the Internet would never have developed so quickly.

Tim imagines that “there would be at least 16 different Web types in the world, CERN, Microsoft, Apple, and so on”.

In 1994, Tim Berners Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) because he felt the Web was growing so fast that it needed a foundation or commission to regulate it. To reach a global standard.

The W3C later invented a number of languages and specifications: HTML, CSS, XML, etc. Now HTML5 is also mandated by them.

The MOST important work of the W3C is developing Web specifications (called recommendations, for “recommendations”) that describe the Web’s communication protocols (such as HTML and XHTML) and other building blocks.

The official website of the W3C is www.w3.org.

If you want to learn a variety of technologies (HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, PHP, etc.), you can go to the W3C Academy: www.w3schools.com.

The corresponding Chinese website is www.w3school.com.cn.

4. To summarize

The Web (short for The World Wide Web) is a part of the Internet (the Internet or Internet). It is the best known part of the Internet. Today we use the browser to surf the Internet, to browse the Web, to use the Web.
The Internet predates the Web.
Cloud is more of a marketing concept than a technology concept.
The W3C regulates and controls the development of the Web.

5. Part 2 Lesson 1 Preview

That’s all for today’s lesson, come on!

Next lesson: Web exploration trip | in the second part first lesson: the client language

My name is Xie Enming, the operator of the public account “Programmer Union” (wechat id: CoderHub), the moOCs elite lecturer Oscar, and a lifelong learner. Love life, like swimming, a little cooking. Life motto: “Run straight for the pole”