Page 147 - DLIS408_INFORMATION_TECHNOLOGY-APPLICATIONSL SCIENCES

Information Technology and Application

Notes networking. Online shopping has boomed both for major retail outlets and small artisans and
traders. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire
industries.
The origins of the Internet reach back to research of the 1960s, commissioned by the United States
government in collaboration with private commercial interests to build robust, fault-tolerant,
and distributed computer networks. The funding of a new U.S. backbone by the National Science
Foundation in the 1980s, as well as private funding for other commercial backbones, led to
worldwide participation in the development of new networking technologies, and the merger of
many networks. The commercialization of what was by the 1990s an international network resulted
in its popularization and incorporation into virtually every aspect of modern human life. As of
2011, more than 2.1 billion people – nearly a third of Earth’s population – use the services of the
Internet.
The Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for
access and usage; each constituent network sets its own standards. Only the overreaching definitions
of the two principal name spaces in the Internet, the Internet Protocol address space and the Domain
Name System, are directed by a maintainer organization, the Internet Corporation for Assigned
Names and Numbers (ICANN). The technical underpinning and standardization of the core
protocols (IPv4 and IPv6) is an activity of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a non-profit
organization of loosely affiliated international participants that anyone may associate with by
contributing technical expertis.

13.1.1 World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (or the proper World-Wide Web; abbreviated as WWW or W3, and
commonly known as the Web) is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the
Internet. With a web browser, one can view web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and
other multimedia and navigate between them via hyperlinks.
Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim
Berners-Lee, now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), wrote a proposal in March
1989 for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. At CERN in Geneva, Switzerland,
Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext “...
to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at

will”,and they publicly introduced the project in December. “The World-Wide Web was developed
to be a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote
sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.

13.1.2 Web Browser
A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information
resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource

Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content.Hyperlinks present
in resources enable users easily to navigate their browsers to related resources. A web browser can
also be defined as an application software or program designed to enable users to access, retrieve
and view documents and other resources on the Internet.
Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to
access information provided by web servers in private networks or files in file systems. The major
web browsers are Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.

13.2 Web Application
1. Google Calendar is a contact-and time-management web application offered by Google.
2. Horde groupware is an open source web application.
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