A Technical Overview of the World Wide Web

There are essentially three components which together form the World Wide Web, the medium which has brought this document to your screen. They are the Internet, the Information Servers which contain and dispense information, and the Web Browser which the individual uses to obtain information and pages from the web. This page briefly describes each of these components.

The quick explaination of the web is this: web browsers use the Internet to access Servers that contain the pages, images, and other files that the web user is interested in receiving. See our page on Client/Server Software Architecture to find out more about the relationship between programs like browsers (referred to as "clients") and servers.

Information servers run on computers connected to the Internet all over the world. Information servers are processes (executing computer software) which dish out information as requested from users connected to the same network (in the case of the WWW, the public Internet). The most common information types of servers on the Internet today are:

World Wide Web servers;

also called http servers for the underlying protocol with which they communicate with Web browsers, the HyperText Transport Protocol. These servers primarily deliver data for immediate human consumption, primarily web pages. WebCom allows people to have their own websites by giving people the abiliity to create pages that are served by WebCom's World Wide Web servers. See also: hypertext and multimedia.

Gopher servers;

the immediate predecessors of World Wide Web servers, gopher servers present files in distributed archives to you as hierarchical menus. Using a gopher client, you would select a file from a menu. If that file were text, it would next appear on your screen for you to read or browse. If it were any other form of data, such as an image, the file would be transferred to your local computer where you would have to use a separate program to view or use it. After you were done reading or downloading a file, a gopher client would always return you to the previous menu from which you had selected the file.

FTP, or File Transport Protocol Servers;

whose only function is to allow FTP clients to copy files of any kind (programs, images, text, etc.) between the client and server machines. FTP allows you to enter commands and filenames to send to, receive from, and otherwise manage files and directories on a remote computer. (If you log in to read files other than your own, you have to log in as "anonymous" or "ftp", which allows you to read all public files but not alter or delete them, or create new ones.) When you retrieve a file from a remote computer using FTP, you have to invoke a separate program after your FTP session to view that file (a text editor, an image viewer, etc.). WebCom customers use FTP to maintain their WebCom file directories. Graphical FTP clients for Windows or Macintosh relieve the user of the need to learn most of the FTP commands, allowing the user instead to simply drag and drop files to and from their WebCom directory as though it were a local drive on their machine.

NNTP, or Network News Transport Protocol servers;

which deliver Usenet newsgroups and articles.

SMTP, Simple Mail Transport Protocol servers;

which send and receive electronic mail messages.

Archie;

which searches indices of FTP archives for files when given a file name or name fragment.

Veronica;

which searches gopher menus for words or phrases.

Telnet servers;

which allow you to login and conduct a terminal session on the remote computer running the server from anywhere on the net. These sessions are normally UNIX terminal sessions conducted via "VT100" terminal emulators - programs that allow your computer to emulate a DEC VT100 terminal to the remote host.

WAIS, Wide Area Information Servers;

which search distributed volumes of text (which have been pre-indexed for this purpose) for words and phrases, and rank results based on a score - how closely each document satisfied the search criterion.

In the past, accessing these servers required using a separate program for each server type. To access a gopher server, you had to run a gopher client program. To access an FTP server, you had to run your FTP client. To search for a file using Archie or Veronica, you had to run either an Archie or a Veronica client.

The third component of the World Wide Web, a new generation of Internet information clients called Web Browsers, such as Mosaic and Lynx have recently been developed. These browsers have three new capabilities which revolutionize searching and browsing the Internet:

1. World Wide Web browsers are multilingual; they can communicate with all of the servers listed above and more. This relieves the user of the complexities of having to learn and run a separate client for each server they wish to use. There is still some value to understanding the functionality of the underlying servers, however this is less of a requirement when using a WWW browser. Also, for some of these servers it is often more convenient to use a specialized client, such as a threaded news reader to read Usenet news, an Email program to send and receive Email messages, or an FTP client when, for instance, you want to send a file from your computer to a remote computer, or you want to retrieve a large number of files in one bulk copy operation.
2. World Wide Web browsers employ a graphical user interface. Many of the above servers require you to learn an arcane command language or enter UNIX commands. With a WWW browser, you just use your mouse or arrow keys to point at what you want, and click or press return. The browser takes care of the underlying network communications, interfaces, and commands, to bring to you what you clicked on.
3. WWW browsers allow the free-form organization and cross linking and referencing of information called hypertext, hypermedia, or hyperlinking. In this form of information organization, any item of information (a word, a phrase, an image) can also function as a "hotlink" to any other item of information. Underneath every hotlink, hidden to the reader, is a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, which tells your browser where to find the resource pointed to by that hotlink; all you do is point and click. Furthermore, anybody can create hotlinks in their documents to any other publicly accessible resource (you can create hotlinks to your own resources or anybody elses, and anybody else can create hotlinks to your information). This structure creates freedom to organize and share information in myriad and novel ways, resulting in an anarchic, loosely structured web of information, art, music, data, software, literature, and just about anything else which can be represented in digital form and which some person or organization has a desire to share with the world. This is the World Wide Web.

As World Wide Web browsers greatly simplify the browsing and retrieval information from the Web, we at WebCom aim to greatly simplify your ability to be a provider of information and services on the Web.