Website Design and Development with HTML5 and CSS3

1The Web and its Future

At the turn of the 21st century, information, including access to the Internet, became the basis for personal, economic and political progress. A popular name for the Internet is the “information highway”, and it became the place where one goes to find the latest financial news, to browse library catalogs, to exchange information with colleagues or to participate in a lively political debate. The Internet is the tool that will lead you, beyond telephones, faxes and isolated computers, to a rapidly growing network of information without borders.

The Internet complements the traditional tools you use to collect information, graphical data, view the news and connect with others. The Internet is shrinking the world; bringing information, skills and knowledge on almost all subjects imaginable directly to your computer.

The Internet is what we call a meta network, that is a network of networks that covers the entire world. It is impossible to give an exact number of the amount of networks or users that make up the Internet, but it easily exceeds several billion (4.57 billion Internet users in the first quarter of 2020 according to the site blogdumoderateur¹).

1.1. Background

The Internet was first designed by the Department of Defense, as a means of protecting US government communications systems in the event of a military attack. The original network, baptized ARPANET (after the Advanced Research Projects Agency that developed it), evolved into a communication ...