Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (aka. the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separate but related things.
What is The Internet?
The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.
What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video. (Oh schnap, isn’t that what you’re learning how to do in lab??)
The Web is just one of the ways information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.
The Dude
There is a man behind all of this. We almost have to treat him like god because, well, he invented the World Wide Web. Tim Berners Lee, a British engineer who now lectures at MIT, talks really fast but of course with a vibrancy and enthusiasm even you sleepy students will wake up to hear what he has to say. What else is there to know? The man is a genius. And he started it all by asking some very simple questions and prototyping. Learn more in the next paragraph.
Linked Data
In today’s class we’re going to be discussing how things are hyperlinked in your everyday lives. Lets face it. The products we use everyday were designed in a way that designs your life. Your previous homework had you make a visual map of 24 waking hours. As a result, we proved technological interfaces are integrated in every hour of your consciousness (well, as a sophomore college student here at Parsons). Life would change fo sho. As a user, we saw that information or data was demanded to be immediate, accesible, and convenient to carry out a fairly comfortable day. The powers of the hyperlink allows this to be.
Our first project will be a group assignment where three students will be assigned a local non-profit’s website to redesign. This will require you learn about your organization and their targeted domain(s) of interest. Check out the homework page for additional criteria and breakdown.
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