Internet & Web Architecture: Standards, Protocols, and Growth

Internet

A global network of interconnected computer networks, sometimes referred to as a "network of all networks."

World Wide Web (WWW)

A system of interlinked documents and multimedia accessed via the Internet.

WWW

service that runs on top of the Internet

IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force)

Develops Internet protocol standards.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)

Manages domain names and IP addresses.

W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

Creates web standards (HTML, CSS, etc.).

Client

Sends request (e.g., web browser).

Server

Responds with resources (e.g., web server).

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol)

Protocol used for web pages.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Protocol used for file upload/download.

TCP/IP

Core communication protocol (packet transfer & routing).

Domain Name System (DNS)

Translates human-friendly names into IP addresses.

TLD (Top-Level Domain) examples

.com, .org, .edu, .ph

Example of DNS

google.com → 216.58.194.46

SGML

Early standard.

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

Foundation of the web.

XML

Data structuring.

HTML5

Modern standard (supports multimedia, APIs, semantic tags).

Web Architecture

Structure under which the information or content of a website is organized, ordered, and classified.

Purpose of Web Architecture

Helps users find the information they need and helps search engine crawlers understand relationships between pages.

Hierarchical (Horizontal) Web Architecture

Structure like a tree (homepage → categories → subcategories → detail pages).

Sequential (Vertical) Web Architecture

Depth-oriented; multiple levels of navigation moving in one direction.

Matrix / Database / Hybrid Architectures

Allows multiple navigation paths (like Wikipedia's internal linking).