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How the Web
Works
The World
Wide Web, the graphical portion of the Internet, is the most popular
part of the Internet by far. Once you spend time on the Web,you will
begin to feel like there is no limit to what you can discover. The
Web allows rich and diverse(1) communication by
displaying text, graphics, animation（2）, photos, sound
and video.
So just what is this miraculous（3） creation? The
Web physically consists of your personal computer, web browser
software, a connection to an Internet service provider, computers
called servers that host digital data and routers and switches to
direct the flow of information.
The Web is known as a client-server（4） system. Your
computer is the client; the remote computers that store electronic
files are the servers. Here's how it works:
Let's say you want
to pay a visit to the the Louvre museum website. First you enter the
address or URL（5） of the
website in your web browser (more about this shortly). Then your
browser requests the web page from the web server that hosts the
Louvre's site. The Louvre's server sends the data over the Internet
to your computer. Your web browser interprets the data, displaying
it on your computer screen.
The Louvre's website also has
links to the sites of other museums, such as the Vatican Museum.
When you click your mouse on a link, you access the web server for
the Vatican Museum.
The "glue" that holds the Web together is
called hypertext and
hyperlinks（6）. This feature allow electronic files
on the Web to be linked so you can easily jump between them. On the
Web, you navigate through pages of information based on what
interests you at that particular moment, commonly known as browsing
or surfing（7） the Net.
To access the Web you need web browser software, such as
Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. How does your web
browser distinguish between web pages and other files on the
Internet? Web pages are written in a computer language called
Hypertext Markup Language or HTML.
Some Web History
The
World Wide Web (WWW) was originally developed in 1990 at CERN, the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics. It is now managed by The
World Wide Web Consortium, also known as the World Wide Web
Initiative.
The WWW Consortium is funded by a large number of
corporate members, including AT&T, Adobe Systems, Inc.,
Microsoft Corporation and Sun Microsystems, Inc. Its purpose is to
promote the growth of the Web by developing technical specifications
and reference software that will be freely available to everyone.
The Consortium is run by MIT with INRIA (The French National
Institute for Research in Computer Science) acting as European host,
in collaboration with CERN.
The National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, was instrumental in the development of early
graphical software utilizing the World Wide Web features created by
CERN. NCSA focuses on improving the productivity of researchers by
providing software for scientific modeling, analysis, and
visualization. The World Wide Web was an obvious way to fulfill that
mission. NCSA Mosaic, one of the earliest web browsers, was
distributed free to the public. It led directly to the phenomenal
growth of the World Wide Web.
注释：
diverse：adj. 不同的,
变化多的
animation：动画
miraculous： adj. 奇迹的,
不可思议的
client-server：客户端，客户机
URL：Uniform
Resource Locator
,在Internet的WWW服务程序上用于指定信息位置的表示方法。
hypertext：超文本（一系列逻辑上互相联结的数据库,一个数据库内的信息和另一个数据库内的信息能够在逻辑上交叉链接）
hyperlinks：超链接
surf：
n. 海浪, 拍岸浪；vi. 作冲浪运动；vt. 在激浪上驾(船),
在...冲浪。此处的含义指上网冲浪
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