1.3.5. World Wide Web
Up to then, all described services were available only for a selected user group (developers and Macintosh users). To make multimedia publicly available and accessible on all platforms, Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991. WWW is a hypertext-based system that operates over the internet. Distributed documents, stored on remote computers, can be accessed electronically via web browser software. The WWW is made up of three standards:
- The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which specifies how each page of information is given a unique address at which it can be found (e.g. www.karto.ethz.ch)
- The Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which determines how a web browser requests information from the server and how the server makes the data available.
- The Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a mark up language designed for the creation of web pages, i.e., information presented on the WWW. HTML encodes the information of a web-page so it can be displayed on a variety of devices. HTML is generally written in text files stored on computers connected to the internet.
Here is an example of HTML-Code and how it looks in the browser:
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You will learn more about the three standards URL, HTTP and HTML in a further lesson.