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1/09/09

Difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web

I will probably get flamed for wading into these waters, but since my teenager hasn't picked a fight with me in a few days, here goes.

What's the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?

These two terms are often confused with each other, and even I use them interchangeably, but they are in fact not identical.

The World Wide Web is only a subset of the Internet. There, I said it.

It is one of the largest parts of the Internet, but it is only a part. The other well-known subset of the Internet that everyone knows is email. These two are by far the best known parts of the Internet, but there are plenty of others. ftp (file transfer protocol) and DNS (Domain Name Service) are two more, for example.

I personally identify data protocols as the "parts" or sub-sets of the Internet. You can think of them as foreign languages, in the way that music direction is written in Italian (e.g. adagio) and food often has French references.

http is one such protocol, ftp is another protocol. This is the way information is passed between computers - whether that computer is a client browser and a web hosting server (i.e. a web site) or between two DNS Name Servers seeking to resolve a url.

Most of these protocols belong in my realm of IT people - software developers, network engineers and the like. And I often tell clients and prospects that they don't have to worry about the whole alphabet soup of acronyms (ftp, dns, http) - that's what I am here for.

So now you can enjoy your web site (http) and email (pop & smtp) while smug in the knowledge of the difference of the two. Or maybe just smug in the knowledge that you don't have to know the difference.