Start Here Beginner

What Is the Web?

The web is how we find and share pages on the internet.

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People sometimes mix up two words: the internet and the web. They are not quite the same.

The internet is a giant network of computers all over the world, connected so they can send messages to each other.

The web is one of the things we built on top of the internet. It is all the pages you can visit, read, and link together, like robotexplains.ai.

To find a page, you use its address, called a URL. To talk to the computer that has the page, your browser uses a shared language called HTTP.

And because long number addresses are hard to remember, we give computers friendly domain names instead, like robotexplains.ai.

Put it all together and you get the web: a huge, connected library of pages that anyone can explore.

What to remember

  • The web is how we find and share pages on the internet.
  • Every page has an address called a URL.
  • Browsers and servers talk using a shared language called HTTP.
  • Domain names are easy-to-remember nicknames for computers.

Words to know

The web
All the pages you can visit and link to on the internet.
URL
The address of a page, like robotexplains.ai.
HTTP
The language browsers and servers use to talk.
Domain name
An easy-to-remember name that points to a computer.

For grown-ups

The web is the layer of linked documents and apps that runs on top of the internet. A browser resolves a domain name, requests a resource over HTTP(S), and renders what the server returns. The internet is the network; the web is one of the things we built on it.

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