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By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
Many people use these terms as if they mean the same thing, but they are actually different!
The internet is the physical infrastructure - the actual network of networks that connects millions of computers around the world. Think of it as the roads, cables, routers, and connections that allow data to travel between devices.
The internet is a Wide Area Network (WAN), which means it covers a very large geographical area (in this case, the whole world).
The internet carries many different services, including:
The World Wide Web (or simply "the web") is a collection of websites and web pages that you can access using the internet. It's just one of the services that runs on top of the internet infrastructure.
The web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee. He wanted to make it easier for people to share and access information on a global scale.
Think of it this way:
The web consists of interconnected documents (web pages) and multimedia files (images, videos) that are stored on computers called web servers around the world.
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a web page. It's what you type into your browser's address bar to visit a website.
URLs are text-based to make them easier to remember. Imagine if you had to remember a series of numbers (like 172.217.16.142) for every website you wanted to visit - that would be very difficult! URLs give us easy-to-remember names instead.
A URL typically contains three parts:
Example URL: https://www.cambridgeassistant.com/igcse/computer-science/
| Part | Example | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol | https | The communication method used to transfer data between your computer (client) and the server |
| Domain name | www.cambridgeassistant.com | The name of the server where the website is stored |
| Web page/file name | /igcse/computer-science/ | The location of the specific file or page on that server |
Not all URLs contain all three parts - sometimes you might just see the protocol and domain name (like https://www.google.com).
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