get connected to digital literacy WEB PAGE Design Clive Gifford Crabtree Publishing Company www crabtreebooks com
From its humble start running on a single computer the World Wide Web better known by the letters www has become the world’s biggest source of information and entertainment Every day hundreds of millions of people turn to the Web to look at pages of images text and videos People use smartphones tablets computers to access the Internet and smart TVs as well as welcome to world the Wide web What is the Web Some people think that the Internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing They are not The Internet is the name given to the giant system of computer networks that spans the world It connects millions of computers allowing them to send digital data such as emails or files to one another The World Wide Web is a collection of information that can be accessed using the Internet The Web consists of millions of websites containing documents links and files These can be viewed by almost any device that can access the Internet 4
Web explosion Site types When the World Wide Web was established home computers were still in their early development so not many people had access to the Internet In 1993 there were just 130 websites As home computers became more popular so did the Web By 2000 there were 17 million websites Today there are over one billion websites around the world Some are simple single-page ads or personal pages created by individuals Others are built by companies or governments Some websites are vast containing thousands of different pages By 2017 the English-language edition of the encyclopedia website Wikipedia contained over 5 3 million pages COMPUTER hero British computer scientist Tim Berners Lee worked at a major science research center in Switzerland called CERN He was interested in finding new ways for scientists to share their information With the help of colleagues Berners-Lee invented the HTML coding language see page 12 for creating web pages He developed the rules known as HTTP to transmit the web pages over the Internet He also created the first web page and web server Berners-Lee launched the Internet to the world on Christmas day in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee TRUE STORY What’s in a Name The World Wide Web was nearly called the Information Mesh The Project or the Mine of Information Berners-Lee and his colleagues considered all these names before opting for World Wide Web 5
