As Professor Lampe has stressed, the one major thing that he wants s to take away from this class is to know the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet. Here are some major differences between the two:
- The Internet is the physical notion of connecting many different networks. Those connections themselves are not useful to us. On the Application layer, however, is the WWW, which allows us to use the Internet to access other servers using HTML. The WWW employs many different protocols like HTTP to make this happen.
- The Internet was developed way before the WWW, 1969 and 1990 respectively. Before WWW, many other technologies were used to communicate in between machines connected to one another.
- The Internet allows many different kinds of applications other than what the WWW uses. If you're going to surf, however, you must use the protocols that the WWW uses. To connect to other computers on the Internet, however, there are many other possibilities (BitTorrent, for example)