While flipping through the old pages of a book on Speech and Communication, my eyes caught the following lines of Marshall McLuhan: Someday the whole world would be a global village. He was simply referring to the idealized concept of a diverse community where people of different races and cultures would commune together (New York of today, for example). Little did McLuhan knowthat his words will one day become literal. That day is today! After the short dial-up rattleof my ISP, I loaded Netscape Navigator intomy Windows platform. Within seconds, I pulled out my customized newspaper filled with every storythat fits my profile in sources raging from local, regional, national to countless countries around theglobe; it took me much more time to make the coffee! Desi437 has sent you an instant message;would you like to accept it? Oh! Thats my friend Nisha, from India. Flipping back and forthbetween the browser and the Instant Messenger, I managed to pull out the stats I needed on Ireland,for my History class; a native web site helped greatly. What Jules Verne struggled to do in 80 days, Imore or less, completed in about eight minutes. Thanks to one of the greatest discoveries of thecentury - the World Wide Web! Before an individual can understand the different problems that the World Wide Web faces, it isnecessary to understand what it is exactly and how it is structured. The World Wide Web (www) orsimply web, as it is passionately called among users, can simply be defined as: a large area databasewith a universe of information, providing access to users around the world. Visualize a large filecabinet; it is in fact so large that almost everyone in the world could easily access it. A user can put in(upload) information as well as retrieve (download) it. That is what the web is, today. Simply put, theworld wide web is a critical component of the Internet, joining millions of users for informationinterchange. ...
