World Wide Web
Internet and Its Uses
The Internet and the World Wide Web Are Not the Same Thing
People often use "internet" and "World Wide Web" as if they were the same word. They are not. One is a network; the other is a service that runs on that network.
| The internet | The World Wide Web (WWW) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | The global network of interconnected computers, cables and routers | A collection of web pages and other resources accessed using the internet |
| Type | Infrastructure (the physical and logical network) | A service running on top of the infrastructure |
| Year it appeared | 1969 (the ARPANET, the internet's ancestor) | 1989, invented by Tim Berners-Lee |
| Accessed using | Many different applications and protocols | A web browser, using HTTP/HTTPS |
| Other examples of what runs on it | Email (SMTP/POP3/IMAP), file transfer (FTP), online gaming, video calls, VoIP | The web is one of many internet services |
The simplest test: if you need a to use it, it is the . Anything you do without a browser (sending email from a mail app, joining a video call, streaming music) is using the internet but not the web.
Another way to put it: the could exist without the World Wide Web, but the World Wide Web could not exist without the internet. The web is a service built on top of the internet's networking machinery.
Syllabus definitions: the internet is the infrastructure; the World Wide Web is the collection of websites and web pages that are accessed using the internet. Saying "the internet is the web" does not show the difference.
Common exam question
Naming the World Wide Web from its description
Question: Complete a table of internet terms: beside the description of all the web pages that can be reached using the internet, write the term (1 mark per row).
Asked in 2 of the 17 papers, both times as one row of a table. The term is the World Wide Web (one scheme also accepts WWW). The row tests the distinction above: the internet is the network, the web is the collection of websites and pages reached through it, so "the internet" is not the term described.
The other rows of those tables range across this note and its neighbours: cookie, URL, web server, HTML and HTTP in one paper; IP address, web browser, DNS, proxy server and hacking in the other. A web server stores web pages and returns the page a client requests; HTTP is the protocol for requesting and sending web pages; HTML is the language a website is written in, whose tags include <head> and <body>.