This magical experience we call the World Wide Web is fast becoming an integral part of daily life. Your computer connects to the Internet and uses it's browser program to talk to other computers across the globe. Information can be exchanged, products bought and sold.
The messages are sent over telephone, cable wires, or satellite, depending
on which connection service (ISP, Internet Service Provider, for instance AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Hughs Net, AOL, etc.)
you contract with. Cable, satellite, and DSL (also called high speed) will be faster than dial-up connections. |
The World Wide Web holds a vast collection of hypertext documents and makes them all available through the HTTP protocol around the world, and we view them with a browser such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. These documents are linked together electronically, forming a giant structure similar to a spider's web .... thus the name "the Web". 
When you type a URL in to your browser your ISP connects to other networks until it finds the network containing the site you are requesting. Once you are connected to the server on that network where the site resides, that server sends the information to you in the form of files. Your computer downloads these files and holds them in a directory called "temporary Internet files". Your browser enables your computer to read these files and translate them into images and text on your screen.
These files are written in a language called Hypertext Markup Language (or HTML). This language has the ability to tell a browser exactly how to display the various aspects of a web page: images, text, sound, video, etc. You can view the HTML of a web page by right-clicking anywhere except on an image, and then select "view source". Web developers will use the HTML (along with the newer DHTML, XML. SHTML and CSS) to align, color, and size the images and text, and arrange them in a layout on the pages. Built into the HTML files we also use scripts (snippets of code) written in other programming languages such as JAVASCRIPT, PERL, PHP, or ASP to achieve certain special effects or provide specific functions.
The created HTML files and accompanying image, video, script, etc. files are then stored on a hosting server. A domain name is purchased and connected to the hosting server to identify your site.