The World Wide Web has made an enormous impact on communication in the past few years. Once only accessible to a few, the World Wide Web is now utilized by more than half the populations of developed countries. Originally intended to allow scientists to share information, the World Wide Web is now used by retirees to manage their stock portfolios and by school children to download their homework assignments. All indications suggest that the World Wide Web will continue to grow. .
Web design is a relatively new profession. Unfortunately, some believe that web design is a simple process that can be done without much training. The result is that many websites are not very user-friendly. We have all experienced poorly designed websites where pages take too long to download, text is indiscernible over a wildly patterned background, and navigation is confusing. In this course, you will learn the design principles and conventions that web design experts employ to create well-designed websites. .
This first chapter will provide an overview of how the Internet and the World Wide Web began and how they developed over the years. You will also learn about relevant technologies and terms related to the Internet and the World Wide Web. .
The World Wide Web and the Internet are not the same thing. The Internet is a worldwide computer network that links thousands of smaller networks; whereas, the World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers that support specially formulated documents. In this section, you will learn the differences between the two, as well as gain insight into the history of both the Internet and the World Wide Web. .
The Internet started in the late 1960s and early 1970s as an experiment by the U.S. Department of Defense as a way to communicate with its contractors and researchers at large universities. The government laid cables between its contractors and created a protocol, which is a set of rules that allow computers on a network to talk to one another.
