6 Internet and World Wide Web
The Internet provides
flexible connectivity. It
is a communication network in which a computer can
seek out and connect to another computer anywhere by using
the "name" associated with it. Since its commercialization in
the early 1990's the Internet has completely revolutionized
the use of computers and the flow of information. Before the
Internet computers were connected only using limited local
area network arrangements. Now we fully expect that any
computer or computing device anywhere can quickly connect to millions
of others.
The routers and domain name
servers (DNS) of the Internet provide an electronic
pipeline. The World Wide Web (WWW) is the major
service carried by it. It provides Hypertext
Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which establishes connections
between computers. Hypertext markup
language (HTML) is communicated through the Internet
to define how a computer screen should be formatted, while
scripting languages such as JavaScript and
VBScript provide interactivity in combination with
HTML. Programming languages such as Java, .net,
C, C++, and Perl can interact with the web to provide
access to relational databases. The Internet also
supports File Transfer Protocol (FTP) to ship
files of information in bulk and a variety of other types of
communication.
6 Internet and World Wide Web