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

[ackthpt]

Now we all know.

But 2+2=5, for very large values of 2

This whole arguement is a single voice mumbling in a maelstrom. Rather like people pointing out the 21st century began on Jan 1, 2001, not on Jan 1, 2000 (while being utterly ignored by all the happy people partying.)

Re:And 2+2=4

[realityimpaired]

If you're going to argue that 2.9 is a large value of 2, and not a small value of 3 (in other words, if you're going to truncate rather than round), then you need to do the same action to the result as well. trunc(5.7) is 5, not 6.

Interweb

[TechwoIf]

It is interweb, not internet. ;-)

Re:Interweb

[boristdog]

interwebs is plural, duh.

Re:Interweb

[Chuck Chunder]

What you do in the privacy of your own home is none of our business.

well duh

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not news for nerds or stuff that matters.

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?

Why, thank you for that pedantic rant

[crazyjj]

Bet you're a hoot at parties. I can only imagine how charming a fellow you are when someone uses the term "hacker" to refer to someone who breaks into computer systems.

Laymen's Terms

[russlar]

The internet is a series of tubes, the web are the cats clogging the tubes.

This is Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck happened to this site? Seriously.

I used to come here daily to get my news fix and now it's more like once a month... and I'm immediately disappointed in the quality. I can't even be bothered to log in anymore.

This is amazingly horrible.

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: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.