The difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet

What is the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet?

The phrase ‘World Wide Web’ and the word ‘Internet’ are used often hand in hand, when people mean the internet, they often say the World Wide Web instead. This mistake is extremely common and everyone has probably made it once or twice before.

Though to the average person they are considered the same, there are distinct differences which makes each one it’s own. So, what are the actual differences between the Internet and the World Wide Web?

Definition of the Internet –

The Internet is a global computer network which provides a variety of information and communication facilities. These consist of interconnected networks of which use standardized communication protocols.

Basically put, the internet is a massive network of all other networks and also called the infrastructure of networking. It connects all our computers globally.

Definition of the World Wide Web –

The World Wide Web is an information system ON the Internet which allows documents to be connected to other documents via hypertext links. This enables the user to search for information by moving from one document to another.

In easier terms, the WWW or World Wide Web is a system of Internet servers which support specially formatted documents in HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

Their differences –

From these definitions we can easily tell which is which and why. For example, the internet is the network of networks which connect all of the computers together as long as both are connected to the internet. Whereas the World Wide Web is an information system, which allows documents on the Internet to be connected to others.

The infrastructure (Internet) of which documents are connected to others (World Wide Web) is written in and formatted in HTML. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language, the markup tells your web browser how to display all the words and images of the web page whilst the internet is what all this sits on.

To recap, the internet connects computers globally together depending whether or not they have a connect and the World Wide Web connects documents together which are formatted In HTML which then displays all the images and words on the web page to you.