INTERNET vs. WWW
Understanding the Difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web
The terms “Internet” and “World Wide Web” are frequently used synonymously in everyday speech, leading one to be incorrectly believed to be synonymous with the other, despite the fact that they are two quite distinct concepts.
For the general public, the World Wide Web might simply appear to be another name for the internet, but for professionals in the field of network and information systems, it actually describes two distinct but connected ideas about how online resources function.
World Wide Web
For most people, browsing the web or typing in addresses in search engines is the most familiar use of the internet, but it’s far from the only one.
The World Wide Web — also commonly referred to as “The Web” — was created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s and is a collection of webpages and websites that can be located using their addresses and viewed via web browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, among others.
It became part of the public domain in 1993, after which companies and individuals worldwide created web pages and shared information.
HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), HTML (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), and URL (Uniform Resource Locator) are the essential components of the web.
The web is therefore online content that is formatted in HTML and accessed via the HTTP protocol with the help of a URL, which refers to the address of a given or particular resource on the web.
Internet
The web is therefore a service on the internet, while the Internet is a network of networks that provides a basis for the web or simply a platform on which the web runs. The internet is a communication medium that links millions of computers, devices, and servers, which, among other things, store or host web pages.
The invention of the first versions of the internet dates back to around 1969, courtesy of a government program by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Project. It came to be known as ARPANET, a mainframe computer network that eventually spawned all types of digital data transfers.
A simple way to conceptualize this would be to think of the internet as a series of roads that connect cities to each other, while the World Wide Web can be thought of as the houses, shops, and buildings that can be accessed thanks to these roads.
While using the World Wide Web is the most common way of accessing the internet, mainly because most of the information on the internet is on web pages, a lot of other internet access functions and tasks, such as file transfers, mobile apps, and instant messaging, are not necessarily web-based.
Over time, the role of the World Wide Web in modern computing and internet use might have diminished a little with the advent of alternative internet use applications other than just accessing web pages. Some of these include video games, file transfers and sharing, chats, and apps, among others.
— — -
In summary, while the web and the internet are two different things, the web turned devices capable of connecting to the internet into a tool for the masses and thus popularized and led to the widespread adoption of the internet as a modern way of life.
While the internet is primarily hardware-based, the web, on the other hand, is more software-oriented.
