The World Wide Web, commonly known as WWW or W3, is one of the best inventions of mankind. It is nothing but a huge library available online. It is a system by way of which interlinked documents can be obtained by the user with the help of the Internet. Using the World Wide Web, a user can access any number of web pages containing images, text and videos among other things.

The concept of the World Wide Web was developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee of CERN in Geneva in the year 1989. Since then, it has gone on to become a highly useful and indispensable source of information. Information about almost anything can be obtained via the World Wide Web.

www is often pronounced as ‘dub dub dub’ by New Zealanders, while the Chinese sometimes refer to it as ‘wan wei wang’. When translated, this means ‘ten-thousand dimensional net’ in Chinese.

In order to view a web page, it is necessary to type the URL of the page in the address bar of a browser. Otherwise, a hyperlink linked to that page would also produce the same effect. On doing this, a series of steps is undertaken so as to display the required page on the screen.

When a URL is typed into a browser, the server name is converted into an IP address. A request is sent to the server at that address for the page. Usually, the text part of the page is requested first, after which the images and other parts are requested. Upon receiving the page, the browser makes it available to the user.

The number of requests received for a particular page is referred to as ‘hits’. This determines the popularity of the page on the Internet.

Often pages contain links to other related pages. Clicking on these links would make the page available to the user on the browser.

In case a user wishes to visit a page again within a short time, it is usually not necessary for the browser to request the server again. Normally, browsers maintain data about pages that have been recently visited. This process is known as ‘caching’.

The time that is taken by the browser to display the page required by the user is known as ‘response time’. 0.1 seconds is considered to be the ideal response time.

A study conducted in the year 2001 indicated that there were over 550 billion pages available through the World Wide Web. This included pages in English, German, French, and Japanese. Pages in the English language constituted the major part of the total number of pages, i.e. 56%.