
Chapter 12
The Internet and the Web
12.1 Introduction
Computer networks consist of computers which communicate using communication
links. The Internet and the World Wide Web (Web) are the two widely used computer
networks as we have seen in Chapter 1. The Internet which is the largest computer
network in the world is organized hierarchically from home or office computers to
networks in organizations and then to service providers which are connected via
backbone networks. The Web is functionally an information network that uses the
underlying Internet for data transfer.
In this chapter, we will first investigate the structure and the properties of the
Internet. ...