Nowadays, everybody is using the World Wide Web, or simply the Web, for a variety of purposes. We use it to communicate with others, read news or share our cat pictures, but what exactly is the web? What is happening when you “access” a website like Twitter.com, Facebook.com or Google.com?

The Wikipedia says the following:

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://example.com/), which may be interlinked by hyperlinks, and are accessible over the Internet.

The most important part of that definition is the “information system”. Basically, we use the internet to retrieve, create, update or delete information. When we are looking at a news site, we can say that we retrieved a document from the web. In real life we would have done the same, but with a newspaper. If we post something on Twitter, we create information, just like crating letters and sending them through the mail, and so on.

The web is resembling the real life more than you think. Let’s think about the process of buying a shirt in real life. You would probably take to follow the next steps:

1. Get into your car;
2. Drive to the mall;
3. Pick a store;
4. Pick a shirt.

Exactly the same thing happens on the web, but with different tools:

1. Instead of getting into a car, you open a browser. This “car-browser” will get you anywhere on the planet, as long as you know its address;
2. Got to a website that sell shirts;
3. Pick a category of shirts from that website;
4. Pick a particular shirt.

In this example, the car will become the browser, the address of the mall will become the address of the website, and the store will be the section where you would find the shirt that you are looking for. What about the drive to the mall? Well, the road that you took to the mall is replaced by the internet.

The internet

People often use the internet and the web interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. While we saw that the web is an information system, the internet is the infrastructure that allows you to get to that information. The term comes from interconnected and networks. You can think of the internet as a complex road system. When you access Amazon.com you could say that you are driving to the mall, but without actually moving your legs and light-speed fast. Your browser will help you move through a series of “roads” and “intersections” until you’ve reached the Amazon website.

In real life, the internet is made of a lot of networks that are interconnected. It all starts with your Local Area Network(LAN). The wireless and wired devices that are connected to your router form a network. This network is a very small piece of what the internet is.

Local(home) network

If your router is not connected with the outside, the devices that you have connected to the network will have access only to each other. The fun part starts when your network is connected to a public gateway that your ISP is maintaining. The ISP will facilitate the communication from your network to other networks. In real life, the ISP network is a lot more complicated, but the important thing to understand is that the internet is made of a lot of small networks.

Part of a public network

Real life network

The Opte Project generated a visualization of a part of the internet in 2005. As you can see, there are a lot of networks that are connected to nodes that connect to other nodes, and so on.

By The Opte Project - Originally from the English Wikipedia; description page is/was here., CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1538544

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An interesting thing is how these connections are made. The answer is pretty simple: mostly by cables. Because I represented the outside connection using a cloud, it could make you think that the internet transmits information using wireless technologies and that is true for a part of it, but the cable is still the main transport medium. This raises the question of how the whole world is connected because we have, you know, oceans between us. The answer is still cables! The Submarine Cable Map gives us a pretty good idea of how the connections are made.

Source: https://www.submarinecablemap.com

Now that we have a basic idea about hot the internet works, we can start looking into the actual web. In part 2 we will see how the web works and which tools are needed in order to accomplish that.