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Many people use the terms Internet
and World
Wide Web (a.k.a. the Web)
interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not
synonymous. The Internet
and the Web
are two separate but related things. The Internet
is a massive network
of networks,
a networking
infrastructure. It connects millions of computers
together globally, forming a network
in which any computer can communicate with any other
computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet.
Information that travels over the Internet
does so via a variety of languages known as
protocols.
The World Wide Web,
or simply Web,
is a way of accessing information over the medium of
the Internet.
It is an information-sharing model that is built on
top of the Internet.
The Web
uses the HTTP
protocol,
only one of the languages spoken over the Internet,
to transmit data.
Web
services, which use HTTP
to allow applications to communicate in order to
exchange business logic, use the the Web
to share information. The Web
also utilizes browsers,
such as Internet
Explorer or Netscape,
to access Web
documents called Web
pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks.
Web
documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and
video.
The Web
is just one of the ways that information can be
disseminated over the Internet.
The Internet,
not the Web,
is also used for e-mail,
which relies on SMTP,
Usenet
news groups, instant
messaging and FTP.
So the Web
is just a portion of the Internet,
albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not
synonymous and should not be confused.
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