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What is the Web?

The World Wide Web is an extremely widespread information service, which is easy and inexpensive to use. It is all-embracing in its capacity to provide a consistent interface to other information systems (Gopher, WAIS, FTP, USENET News, and so on) and in its availability on virtually all current computer platforms. Unlike the more established mass media it is interactive, making everyone a potential publisher, and since it is designed to be an open-ended multimedia system, it can deliver both text and non-text based information (audio, video and graphics). As new forms of information, such as virtual reality systems, become more readily available they too will be delivered over the Web. The Web is still in a state of rapid evolution: people are discovering new ways to use it all the time and anyone can contribute to the debate.

The Web is a global hypertext system. Hypertext is a computer-based system for linking documents to other related documents. Links are embedded within the text of a document in the form of highlighted words or images and, when activated, cause the linked document to be instantly retrieved and displayed. The linked document can itself contain links to other documents, and so on, ad infinitum. Links are most commonly activated by pointing and clicking with a mouse.

The Web is an abstract idea with a concrete realization. Theoretically it could encompass the sum of all human knowledge, complete with indexes and cross-references. On a more mundane level it is a dynamic body of information, distributed around the world by computers communicating via standardized protocols. In concrete terms there are three simple aspects to the Web which enable it to function in practice:

• A consistent naming scheme for referring to resources
• A mechanism for retrieving a resource, given its name
• A system for describing the logical structure of text

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.