The Web Is Not the Internet

pigrabbitbear writes with this rant from Motherboard.vice.com: "The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same thing. They're not synonyms. They don't even serve the same function. And, just like how England is in the United Kingdom, but the United Kingdom isn't England, getting the distinction wrong means you can inadvertently sound like a dummy. Most of the time they can be used synonymously and no one will care, but if you're talking about history or technical stuff and you want to be accurate or a know-it-all or beat a computer at Jeopardy, you should know the difference. The Web was born at CERN in 1990, as a specific, visual protocol on the Internet, the global network of computers that began two decades earlier."

Comments

And 2+2=4

[dmesg0]

Now we all know.

Re:And 2+2=4

[Yaztromo]

How much work on the internet do we do outside normal HTTP/HTTPS protocols?

Quite a lot in traffic terms. Streaming video (Netflix et al.) and BitTorrent use massive amounts of traffic without a lot of HTTP(S). Lesser bandwidth uses, but still very important include VoIP, SSH, SMTP/POP3/IMAP, various instant messaging protocols, VNC...honestly, if you're doing most of your work within only HTTP, you're an internet lightweight. It's a magical Internet out there, jellomizer ol' buddy -- let's go exploring.

Yaz

This story is for idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is jumping the fucking shark. This story belongs on CNN.com, where their tech reporters are busy giving the dead Steve Jobs rimjobs every day.

The article's wrong too

[Bogtha]

What's not on it: Lots of stuff. E-mail, smartphone apps, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, instant messaging programs, FTP, and Usenet, for example.

The web is not simply whatever is transmitted over HTTP. It's an information space, where anything addressable by URI is a leaf in the node. For instance, a telephone number is part of the web because of tel: URIs. Most of the things on his list are part of the web too - there are FTP and NNTP protocols. And in fact, some P2P networks work over HTTP anyway.

From Tim Berners-Lee himself, writing in 1996:

An information object is "on the web" if it has a URI.

Re:The article's wrong too

[Sarten-X]

The Internet is a network of computers. The World Wide Web is a network of information. The Semantic Web is a network of information with contextual meaning in an annotated (preferably machine-readable) form.

Re:the firehose

[Jeng]

The next submission to be accepted.

http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Re:This is Slashdot?

[datavirtue]

I stay logged in. But I agree, this site is painful anymore, and I find myself browsing it less and less--ignoring stories more and more with an eye roll. To me, it is sad as there are no other communities which equal what /. once was. I would pay for membership to clean it up. Free sites are becoming useless because of crap invited by the ability of people to signup and post without barrier.

Re:Was it visual?

[c0d3g33k]

MicroVAX for me. As I recall, the visual component was there initially, if your monitor could display graphics. Since the WWW was originally concieved as a way for researchers to share research results over the internet, URLs could refer to non-textual information, including, but not limited to visual information. Though the original browser was text-only, you could browse to an image that would display on your graphics capable monitor. It just wasn't integrated into the page alongside the text. The integrated text+graphics browser you're thinking of became popular with the development of Mosaic, although there were a few other WWW clients that did a passable job of it before Mosaic came along. Mosaic worked best, though, so it was the game-changer.