Internet and WWW - are the same thing?

There are most of the people think that the terms Internet and World Wide Web both describe as same meaning, but in fact, the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web both are related things but these two are separate.

In this article, we are discussing Internet and World Wide Web, and find the differences between them.

So, let’s start -

Internet

At first, we find out what is the Internet. The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to link devices worldwide. The network consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope and linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. It carries a huge range of information resources and services such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.

The Internet was an infrastructure with a foundation going as far back as 1969 and the U.S. DoD’s Advanced Research Project Agency’s effort to create a strong communication network in case of war. This physical network connected critical Universities working on Defense projects with government and military departments. Eventually "ARPAnet" grew and transformed into the impressive system that we now know today as the “Internet”.

World Wide Web

And the other side, World Wide Web is the system that we use to access information from the Internet. The World Wide Web is the brains of the whole thing. Take all of that hardware and infrastructure and picture installing software onto those servers and computers. These would include Internet browsers and other software that can communicate via the TCP/IP protocol that everything connected to the Internet uses to communicate.

The Web isn't the only system out there, but it's the most popular and widely used. The WWW makes hypertext use to access the various forms of information which are available on the world's different networks. It shares the knowledge and opinions among the people worldwide. We access the web via browsers like - Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and many more. You can visit various Web sites and view other online content By using WWW.

So, what’s the differences between internet and WWW?

We can say that the Internet is the composition of the machines, hardware, and data. And the World Wide Web is the primary application program to access the Internet. The Internet is the part of the hardware and connected through either copper wires like - telephone circuits, broadband over coaxial cable, fiber optics, or through wireless connections like - Wi-Fi, satellite, and cellular telephone 3G, 4G technology. And the World Wide Web is a part of the software. It is a collection of web pages connected through hyperlinks and URLs.

The Internet is governed by the Internet Protocol and dealing with data as a whole and their transmission in packets. But, the World Wide Web is governed by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol and that is deal with the linking of files, documents and other resources of the World Wide Web.

• The first version of the Internet was known as ARPANET. In the beginning, WWW was known as NSFNET.
• Internet is the base, independent of the World Wide Web.
• WWW depends on the Internet to work.
• The Internet is actually a huge network that is accessible to everyone & everywhere across the world. The internet is governed by a set of rules, laws & regulations, collectively known as the Internet Protocol (IP).
• The World Wide Web can be termed as the software part – it is a collection of web pages connected through hyperlinks and URLs.
• The Internet represents the hardware of the net – the infrastructure that is laid out and operates with a common protocol that makes everything work. On the other hand, the World Wide Web is the software of the net – the vast network of applications and protocols that make everything communicate.
  
• The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones. This made it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers.
• The World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions.
• There is a huge amount of information available in the www. Only a tiny part of this information is searchable through popular search engines like Google.
• WWW uses HTTP protocol to access the information from various servers. Web pages and other pieces of information in WWW are identified by their Uniform Resource Locator (URL) address.

Hope this article will help you to differentiate between Internet and WWW. Thanks for reading our article.