Abstract
Like water and energy, the World Wide Web has pervaded the remotest corners of the planet. This chapter examines the Web from different viewpoints to analyze its working pattern and to recognize its strengths, aptitudes, skills, and future scope. The Web is a huge network that, viewed from afar, shares the properties of scale-free random networks. The pattern of links does not give a sense of scale. It does not make much sense to talk about the “average” number of links into or out of a node. The connectivity imparted by links breaks the Web into distinct regions or continents. Normally the Web is associated with technical constructs such as the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the Universal Resource Locators (URLs), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). But it also incorporates stimulating contributions from librarians, psychologists, economists, linguistics, lawyers, social anthropologists, and humanities scholars. Indeed, they propose ideas that never cross the minds of computer experts. The chapter provides the technical background of the Web and the way it works in the acronym-laden world of HTML, HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), Extensible Markup Language (XML), Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs), and Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)—finding new meanings for cookies and crawling, for mysterious-sounding avatars, for chat-bots, for blogs, and for wikis.
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