Internet and the Web

Today in a seminar when the presenter used the terms Internet and Web, not interchangeably, but as two separate items. At that moment, I could not understand why he used both terms separately.

With nothing available, except my phone, I asked the question to my Twitter friends. "Do the terms the Web and the Internet have different meanings?"

Some of my followers thought like I did. They used these terms interchangeably. However, some others spent a little time finding the answer on the Web.

In fact the two terms are not synonymous. Eli Sagor tweeted a response that included  The Difference Between the Internet and the World Wide Web,  The Internet is a network of networks--an infrastructure of networks.

The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

The Web is one of the uses of the Internet.

The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet.

The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.

In the Twitter exchange, Jonathan Davis and Janyne Kizer pointed out that the Internet supports the web, email, video conferencing, instant messaging, and other applications.

The web is just one resource/use of the Internet. Vconf, VOIP, and email are others that not necessarily web-based.

Thanks to Dusty Hall who referred to two different Wikipedia articles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.

Thanks to Matt Laney, John Dorner, Brian Webster, Janyne Kizer, Matt Brooks, Peter Fleck, Greg Parmer, and Kevin Gamble for helping with my understanding and joining the conversation. Some of the replies can be found in Summize search.

So now I know. These two terms do not mean the same thing.

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