For those readers familiar with the term, but not sure as to what the Internet is, it is a collection of computers in disparate locations that are connected via a network. The Internet began when the U.S. Department of Defense became interested in sharing information resources across computers in disparate locations. The number of computers connected to the Internet has grown exponentially. In 1983 there were 562 computers connected to the Internet. This growth is due for the most part to new computer connections by businesses, schools, and homes.
Web documents have two defining characteristics.
First, Web documents are in hypertext format. The related text may be in the same document, a different document on the same computer, or a document on a computer located half-way around the world. In Figure 1 links are indicated by the bold and underlined text. For example, clicking on the link IOTAs by Mike Coovert will display Mike's IOTA column from the issue. As an analogy, consider an encyclopedia.