So I was recently discussing something with my flatmate. I can’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but it had something to do with the internet. I said something about IRC, and compared it to “the Web” (sorry about this vagueness – I really can’t remember what we were talking about).
Him: “Hang on a minute – IRC is part of the Web!”
Me: " " (yes, I really did say this emoticon)
Him: “Well, IRC sits on top of the TCP/IP protocols, so it is, by definition, part of the internet.”
Me: “Yeah, but we were talking about the Web, not the whole internet!”
Him: “The web is the internet!”
A massive fistfight broke out and I killed him.
So, Millions, who was right? Is the Web merely a synonym for the internet? Or does it only refer to HTTP/HTTPS (web pages), and exclude other internet things like IRC, FTP, newsgroups, and email?
IMNEVHHFO, the web is just the place with the pretty pictures, a subset of the internet. There’s also telnet, email, ftp, there was a another thread that mentioned GOPHER which I’m suprised I remember, there’s games, but the WEB proper is just the place with the pretty colors and the clicky link things and the porn.
The Web is HTTP/HTTPS only. Lots of stuff goes across the internet, machine to machine, without ever needing to touch a web server. Email, for one. And FTP. And VPNs. And time synchronisation. And BitTorrent. And all sorts of stuff under the hood that keeps the net running.
This is blurred to the user, though, because a) most non-Web services can be accessed optionally through servers with web interfaces, and 2) browsers can do things like FTP and text-mode console interfaces which don’t use HTTP(S).
I don’t think I really use the term “the Web.” I refer to the Internet instead. If I need to refer to a specific protocol I would say so. Thinking about it most of the people who I hear say “the Web” wouldn’t know anything about FTP, Telnet, VPN, etc. So they use it to refer to HTTP. I do use the term web sites. For me a web site is any page that is accesible through a web browser. So an FTP site would be a web site if I used my browser to open it, but it wouldn’t be if I used FTP. The only time I would even use a browser to access FTP sites is if it was linked from a HTML page. An example would be the old cdrom.com site. It was basically a HTTP front end to a large FTP server. It would be a web site even though most of the traffic was FTP.
The web is HTTP and HTTPS. IRC is not the web. FTP is not the web. These things existed before there was a web as we know it, as did Usenet and a bunch of other stuff that I still use (or as some of my students once put it, ‘my kind’ still uses).
The mistaken belief that the web = the internet, I think, stems from the old AOL commercials in which they would show a website and then call AOL ‘the Internet and a whole lot more.’ This implied that the web is the Internet and the Internet is the web.
IMO, HTTP and HTTPS are it for the web. Everything else is just regular Internet.
" (yes, I really did say this emoticon)