What Is The World Wide Web (WWW)? - TechTarget

How does the World Wide Web work?

Paving the way for an internet revolution that has transformed the world in only three decades, the World Wide Web consists of multiple components that enable users to access various resources, documents and web pages on the internet. Thus, the WWW is like a vast electronic book whose pages are stored or hosted on different servers worldwide.

These pages are the primary component or building blocks of the WWW and are linked through hyperlinks, which provide access from one specific spot in a hypertext or hypermedia document to another spot within that document or a different one. Hyperlinks are another defining concept of the WWW and provide its identity as a collection of interconnected documents.

Hypertext is a method for instant information cross-referencing that supports communications on the web. Hypertext makes it easy to link content on one web page to content on another web page or site. Hypertext and HTTP enable people to access the millions of websites active on the WWW.

This article is part of

What is Web 3.0 (Web3)? Definition, guide and history

• Which also includes:
• Web 2.0 vs. Web 3.0 vs. Web 1.0: What's the difference?
• 10 core features of Web 3.0 technology
• 8 top Web 3.0 use cases and examples

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is another key component of the WWW. It enables users to access web pages by standardizing communications and data transfer between the internet's servers and clients.

Most web documents and pages are created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a text-based way of describing how content within an HTML file is structured. HTML describes the structure of web pages using elements or tags and displays the content of these pages through a web browser.

To access one of these pages, a user and their client machine supply a universal identifier to the web server via a browser. This identifier may be a uniform resource locator (URL) or uniform resource identifier (URI) and is unique to each web page.

A collection of web pages belonging to a URL is called a website. For example, www.techtarget.com is a website, while https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/World-Wide-Web is a web page.

The browser accepts the URL or URI provided by the user and communicates it to the web server. The server then retrieves the web page associated with that URL or URI and presents it to the user in the browser window of their client machine.