A person reading a hypermedia document about dogs might select a picture of a beagle and hear the sound of a dog barking. The World Wide Web also subsumes previous Internet information systems such as Gopher and FTP . These resources can still be accessed through the Web, but the Web provides a wealth of additional capabilities not previously offered by these more restricted connection methods. Thousands upon thousands of computers around the world are now connected to the Web and offer a tremendous variety of information and services to visitors. These online documents composed and supported by various people and organizations are generally referred to as pages.
Web pages are available for an amazing variety of tasks ranging from the playful to the serious.
Thousands of links to new services are added to the Web each day, and its growth has been explosive. To use the World Wide Web, you need access to a Web browser , a program that lets the computer you're using communicate in the Web's language with other computers on the Internet. Creating a Web page You can also use the World Wide Web to provide information to other people around the world. See the references at the end of this text for more information about creating your own Web page. You can read Usenet newsgroups through some Web browsers such as Netscape Navigator.