History of web design

This article discusses the history of web design.

Origins

It's important to understand the differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web.

The Internet is a network of huge computer networks. The Internet allows many any number of computers to connect and communicate with each other globally.

The Internet is built on a set of communications protocols -- languages which define how information can travel between computers.

Common protocols for transferring emails are IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.

Just as email is a layer on the internet, the World Wide Web is another layer which uses different protocols.

World Wide Web protocols

The World Wide Web uses three protocols:

• HTML (Hypertext markup language) - The language that we write our web pages in.
• HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) - Although other protocols can be used such as FTP, this is the most common protocol. It was developed specifically for the World Wide Web and favored for its simplicity and speed. This protocol requests the 'HTML' document from the server and serves it to the browser.
• URL (Uniform resource locator) - The last part of the puzzle required to allow the web to work is a URL. This is the address which indicates where any given document lives on the web. It can be defined as <protocol>://<node>/<location>