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

Re:well duh

[Quiet_Desperation]

Not sure it's news for anyone. I know completely nontech folks who get the distinction because the use the web along with email and messaging and video streaming and online gaming. They seem to refer to the "web" when appropriate, and when they occasionally don't, who the hell cares?

And what is the Internet?

[Cyberax]

And what is the Internet? The best definition I know is: "The largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric closure of the relationship 'can be reached by an IP packet from'" by Seth Breidbart. Which is somewhat of a mouthful.

Who can give a better definition?

Re:ugh...

[AliasMarlowe]

this should have read:

"2 cups of water + 2 cups of alcohol does not equal 4 cups of fluid. /end chemistry jackassery"

Indeed it does not. If you add 2 cups of water to 2 cups of ethanol you get almost 4.1 cups of fluid due to the excess volume of mixing. The result is fractionally greater if thermal expansion due to released enthalpy of mixing is included.

Pardon my deficiency in jackassery where physical chemistry is concerned.