3.3.2 What Does the WWW Define?
An official description of WWW is: ``An Internet-wide distributed hypermedia information retrieval system which provides access to a large universe of documents'' [Hub96]. It is based on a client/server protocol. There are several clients (WWW browsers) available; the most commonly used are the Netscape Navigator (NN) and the Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE) both discussed in the remainder of this section. There are also a great number of servers on the market. Let's see how the fathers of W3 described their system [BLCL+94]:
- The idea of a world of boundless information in which all items have a reference by which they can be retrieved;
- The address system (URI
) which the
project implemented to make this world possible, despite many different
protocols;
- A network protocol (HTTP) used by native WWW servers giving performance and features not otherwise available;
- A markup language (HTML) which every WWW client is required to understand, and is used for transmission of basic things such as text, graphics and simple on-line help information across the net;
- A body of data available on the Internet using all or some of the preceding items.
