What is the Internet?
The Internet is a network of millions of computers linked together by telephone lines, fibre-optic cables, satellite, and microwave connections.

What is the World Wide Web?
The WWW, or "the Web", is the part of the Internet where millions of Web pages containing (hyper)text, images, and sounds from people and institutions all over the world are connected. A typical Web page looks like a magazine page, but with your mouse you can click on (hyper)links - "live", "hot" areas on the page - to go to another screen/page. Links can be text, images or sometimes sounds. You can easily go on the web by using software, called a web browser. Two of the most popular are Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla FireFox (FF).

Internet offers some services, only one of which is the WWW. Others are e-mail, transfer of files between computers, exchange of instant messages in real time, and some more which are covered in other tutorials.

In order to make these services available, the Internet uses protocols. For example, to deliver Web pages [which are actually (hyper)text], the Internet uses HTTP, i.e. HyperText Transfer Protocol. Respectively, FTP is File Transfer Protocol - used to transfer files from one computer to another via the Internet. You can send e-mail messages thanks to the "mailto" protocol. But we needn't go deeper into that now.

Now, I mentioned "hyper", Actually everything on the Internet is "hyper-something". The web is generally hypertext, images and sounds as we said. To display this hypertext there's a way of formatting it called HTML - HyperText Markup Language. Contrary to what you might be tempted to think, HTML is not a programming language, though it says so. And it is very often referred to as HTM - HyperText Markup. HTML (HTM) is script, a set of formatting rules that tells the browser what formatting to use to display a web page.

I also mentioned (hyper)links. Let me clear this further. As we said (hyper)links or just links are live, hot areas on a web page which when clicked on transport you to another page. How to guess that an item is a link? When you mouse over the link - be that text, image or sometimes sound - your mouse pointer changes from an 'arrow' to a 'hand'. When you click on it, we said, a new web page will display in your browser window.

Ok, let's move on deeper into the Internet. You'll now ask, and you'll be right "How do I use that?" In order to display a web page your computer must be told where the page is. The "where" is important. Just as you have a unique address where you live, pages on the Internet have unique addresses where they reside/live. Whats in an address? The address is usually referred to as URL Uniform Resource Locator and you can figure out the acronym and its function. A typical URL or address of a web page looks like the following text string:

http://www.domain.com/directory/sub_directory/file_name.html

Now let's demystify this. In the first place "http://www" tells the browser what protocol to use, i.e. itll be transferring (hyper)text, and this text will be from the WWW, from a place (computer) named "domain", which is of a commercial type ".com". Following the path after that, you can figure out what were trying to retrieve. That is a web page (a file) called "file_name", written in HTML, which resides/lives in "sub_directory", which in its turn is placed in "directory". Not very difficult to make out, isn't it? But it's very difficult to remember all those web page addresses that you find interesting and useful. This has a solution Bookmarks, or Favourites but this will come later.

Now, lets try the address where we are now.
http://ictlt.teachereducation.org.uk/tutorials/tutorial_1.html

Going back to front, we get some text in html called tutorial_1, that lives in the 'house' (tutorials) in the 'city' ictlt which is in the UK (.org.uk) on a computer called (teachereducation) that is on the Web. And by using the appropriate protocol (http://) we tell the computer we want this text transferred to our screen.

Imagine you have the address of a web page and you want to 'visit' the site. Just type in this address into the address bar of your browser, strike the "Enter" key and off you go. Within seconds you get what you asked for. Something to add here. Ive used web page and web site. Whats the difference, youll ask. A web site is a collection of web pages grouped together. Thinking in human terms this is like a family living together at the same address. When you type in an address to visit a site (a family) you'll most often type only "http://www.domain.com". Your computer will look for a page at this unique address usually called "index" or "default", so its just futile effort for us to type in 'index' or 'default' since the computer will automatically try to find it. This "index" or "default" page is called a "Home page", the first page you see when the site displays. And it's up to us to address a web site" or a "web page" on the web site. And we don't always have to type " http:// ", the computer will 'figure out'.

Let's stop here and give you a little rest.