The World Wide Web (WWW) is collection of hypertext documents or web pages that are hosted by particular computers on the Internet, called WWW servers. To request a web page from a WWW server, your Web browser on your computer uses a specific language (or protocol), which we call the Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to communicate with the WWW server.

To identify which web page you want to receive, you use an Universal Resource Locator or URL. The URL identifies both the protocol (http), the domain name (for instance microsoft.com) and the actual page in that domain. Your browser will first resolve the domain name into an Internet address, and will then send the request to that address using the specified protocol (http). The WWW server will send back the requested page, which will contain other URL's to other web pages.

It is important to distinguish the WWW from the Internet. The WWW is only one, all be it very popular, way to use the Internet. There are many more applications of the Internet, of which email and Peer to Peer (P2P) applications are also extremely popular.

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