Mousebusters.com

The World Wide Web (WWW) was invented by a physicist named Tim Berners-Lee in 1989/90 while he was working at CERN, a particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. The Web is a very ambitious project that involves an attempt to organize all of the information on the Internet.

The Internet can be defined as a network of networks that uses a common set of protocols (rules) to exchange information. A computer network is made up of computers connected together by cables or wireless connections.

The World Wide Web uses hypertext. Hypertext is text that is linked to other text. Usually links on the Web are blue by convention although this can vary widely. When you click on a hypertext link with a mouse, a file is transferred to your computer and displayed on the screen.

Hypermedia is the linking of different types of media. For example, one could link a picture of a frog to text about frogs, a video clip showing a frog jumping, or a sound file containing a frog croaking. These are all examples of hypermedia.

You can access the World Wide Web using web browsers. The first web browsers only used text, and a widely used one was called Lynx.

Today's web browsers incorporate the use of a graphical user interface (GUI) which makes the use of the browser more user friendly.

Examples of some commonly used web browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Opera.

Another useful feature of the World Wide Web is that pieces of information have unique addresses called URLs. A URL (uniform resource locator) specifies the exact location of a picture, sound, video, piece of text.

To visit a web site one just needs to type in the URL in the white box near the top of the web browser and hit enter.