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How the World Wide Web Works?


Now, we have understood that WWW is a collection of websites connected to the internet so that people can search and share information. Now, let us understand how it works!


The Web works as per the internet's basic client-server format as shown in the following image. The servers store and transfer web pages or information to user's computers on the network when requested by the users. A web server is a software program which serves the web pages requested by web users using a browser. The computer of a user who requests documents from a server is known as a client. Browser, which is installed on the user' computer, allows users to view the retrieved documents.


All the websites are stored in web servers. Just as someone lives on rent in a house, a website occupies a space in a server and remains stored in it. The server hosts the website whenever a user requests its WebPages, and the website owner has to pay the hosting price for the same.
The moment you open the browser and type a URL in the address bar or search something on Google, the WWW starts working. There are three main technologies involved in transferring information (web pages) from servers to clients (computers of users). These technologies include Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Web browsers.

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML):


HTML is a standard markup language which is used for creating web pages. It describes the structure of web pages through HTML elements or tags. These tags are used to organize the pieces of content such as 'heading,' 'paragraph,' 'table,' 'Image,' and more. You don't see HTML tags when you open a webpage as browsers don't display the tags and use them only to render the content of a web page. In simple words, HTML is used to display text, images, and other resources through a Web browser.

Web Browser:


A web browser, which is commonly known as a browser, is a program that displays text, data, pictures, videos, animation, and more. It provides a software interface that allows you to click hyperlinked resources on the World Wide Web. When you double click the Browser icon installed on your computer to launch it, you get connected to the World Wide Web and can search Google or type a URL into the address bar.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP):

Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol which enables WWW to work smoothly and effectively. It is based on a client-server model. The client is a web browser which communicates with the web server which hosts the website. This protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted and what actions the Web Server and browser should take in response to different commands. When you enter a URL in the browser, an HTTP command is sent to the Web server, and it transmits the requested Web Page.

When we open a website using a browser, a connection to the web server is opened, and the browser communicates with the server through HTTP and sends a request. HTTP is carried over TCP/IP to communicate with the server. The server processes the browser's request and sends a response, and then the connection is closed. Thus, the browser retrieves content from the server for the user.

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History of the World Wide Web:

The World Wide Web was invented by a British scientist, Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He was working at CERN at that time. Originally, it was developed by him to fulfill the need of automated information sharing between scientists across the world, so that they could easily share the data and results of their experiments and studies with each other. CERN, where Tim Berners worked, is a community of more than 1700 scientists from more than 100 countries. These scientists spend some time on CERN site, and rest of the time they work at their universities and national laboratories in their home countries, so there was a need for reliable communication tools so that they can exchange information. Internet and Hypertext were available at this time, but  no one thought how to use the internet to link or share one document to another. Tim focused on three main technologies that could make computers understand each other, HTML, URL, and HTTP. So, the objective behind the invention of WWW ...