Word Wide Web and URL

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a collection of multimedia documents that are connected by hypertext links. To view the World Wide Web you need a web browser like Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. World Wide Web documents can include text, pictures, sound, and movies.

What is a URL?

A URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, is the unique address given for each Web page. If you know a page’s URL, you can open it without having to go through other pages. A URL looks like the following:

http://www.mum.edu/welcome.html

Here’s how you interpret a URL.

• The first part, http://, tells what kind of server the URL will open. The http://, or hypertext transfer protocol, is the beginning for web servers, which hold most of the documents you will load in your browser.
• The next part, www.mum.edu is the Internet address for the web site where the document is located. The www stands for World Wide Web; mum for Maharishi University of Management; and the extension edu indicates an educational site. Other common extensions are com (commercial), gov (government), and org (nonprofit organizations). Countries also have their own two-letter endings, such as ja (Japan), au (Australia), and ca (Canada).
• The last part is the file name of the Web page that you see on your screen. Most file names end with htm or html, telling you the format the document it is written in, hypertext markup language (HTML). This format includes the text of the web and special codes that tell browsers how to format the document. You may not need to use the file name because most Web sites include a default Web page (the home page) that displays when you type the URL without the file name.