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The Online Promoters
Searching the Internet
The World Wide Web (www, web, internet) is a system of internet servers that supports hypertext to access several internet protocols on a single interface. Almost every protocol type available on the internet is accessible on the web. This includes e-mail, FTP, Telnet, and Usenet News. In addition to these, the web has its own protocol: HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP.
The web provides a single interface for accessing all these protocols. This creates a convenient and user-friendly environment. It is not necessary to understand all protocols within separate, command-level environments, as was typical in the early days. The web gathers together these protocols into a single system. Because of this feature, and because of the web's ability to work with multimedia and advanced programming languages, the web is the fastest-growing component of the internet.
The operation of the web relies primarily on hypertext as its means of information retrieval. HyperText is a document containing words that connect to other documents. These words are called links and are selectable by the user. A single hypertext document can contain links to many documents. In the context of the web, words or graphics may serve as links to other documents, images, video, and/or sound. Links may or may not follow a logical path, as each connection is programmed by the creator of the source document. Overall, the web contains a complex virtual web of connections among a vast number of documents, graphics, videos, and sounds.
Producing hypertext for the web is accomplished by creating documents with a language called HyperText Markup Language, or HTML. With HTML, tags are placed within the text to accomplish document formatting, visual features such as font size, italics and bold, and the creation of hypertext links. Graphics and multimedia may also be incorporated into an HTML document.
HTML is an evolving language, with new tags being added as each upgrade of the language is developed and released. For example, visual formatting features are now often separated from the HTML document and placed into Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This has several advantages, including the fact that an external style sheet can centrally control the formatting of multiple documents. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) coordinates the efforts of standardizing HTML. The W3C now calls the language XHTML and considers it to be an application of the XML language standard.
The web consists of files, called pages or home pages, containing links to documents and resources throughout the internet. The web is therefore not a fixed entity but one that is in a constant state of development and flux.
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