Here's an interesting question: Why is the World Wide Web called the World Wide Web?

The "World Wide" part is fairly obvious: the network is spread all over the world. But why "Web?"

The answer lies in the way that individual documents connect to one another.

Documents on the World Wide Web network, usually called "Web Pages," are usually created in a format called "HyperText." HyperText differs from standard text in several ways, the most prominent difference being how you can move from one document to another.

Think of a standard text document like a regular book. In order to make sense of the story in the book, you have to start at the beginning and read through page by page in a specific order.

In contrast, a hypertext document can be considered more like an almanac with an index to other pages with related entries on every page. Individual entries in the almanac can be read in any order, and readers can jump from one page to another without needing to read everything in between.

Any individual hypertext document can have a connection, or "link," to any other number of documents. Furthermore, any individual document can have any number of other documents "link" to it. Here's a diagram of how a few sample pages could connect to each other:

Looking at this structure, you can see how the criss-crossing connections look somewhat like a spiderweb; this "model" is the origin of the name.

A collection of Web pages created and/or owned by a common owner is called a "Web site."

Web sites are organized exactly like computer hard drives, with directories, subdirectories, and documents.

This organization is similar to the way a file cabinet is arranged, with the overall Web site being the file cabinet, directories being individual drawers in the file cabinet, subdirectories being folders in a particular drawer, and the actual "Web pages" being papers in each individual folder.

So, if we are looking for a particular document, we'd open the right drawer in a file cabinet, open the right folder in that drawer, and pull out the document. How do we tell a computer on the Internet how to find this document? That's where URL's come in. We'll discuss those on the next page.