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A website (or web site) is a collection of web pages, images, videos and/or other digital assets that is hosted on one or more web servers, usually accessible via the Internet. All publicly-accessible websites are seen collectively as constituting the "World Wide Web". In January 2007, Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company, reported that there were 106,875,138 websites with domain names and content on them, as compared to just 18,000 in August 1995.
 Yahoo! homepage on April 26, 2007 |
2. A website is hosted on a computer system known as a web server, also known as an HTTP server. (These terms can also refer to the software that runs on these systems, retrieving and delivering the web pages. Apache is currently the most commonly used web server software.[1]) The pages of a website can usually be accessed from a common root URL called the homepage, with the URLs of the other pages within a website organized into a hierarchy. Any website can contain a hyperlink to any other website and thus, the distinction between individual websites, as perceived by the user, may sometimes be blurred. Web pages can be viewed or otherwise accessed from a range of computer-based and Internet-enabled devices, including desktop computers, laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and mobile phones.
3. The World Wide Web was created by CERN engineer, Tim Berners-Lee in 1990.[1] Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In the process, he developed the Uniform Resource Identifier, a system of globally unique identifiers for resources on the Web and elsewhere. On April 30, 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to every one to use.[1] Before the introduction of HTML and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), other protocols such as File Transfer Protocol and the Gopher were used to retrieve individual files from a web server. These protocols offer a simple directory structure which the user navigates and chooses files to download. Documents were most often presented as plain text files, without formatting, or were encoded in word processor formats.
4. Websites today may either be:
- Static: Primarily coded in HTML, its web pages are stored on the server in the same form as the user will view them.
- Dynamic: Its web pages, in contrast, are not stored on the server in the same form as the user will view them. Instead, its content changes automatically, each time a page is requested, based on certain criteria.
A website could be the work of an individual, a business, or other organization, and is typically dedicated to some particular topic or purpose. Some websites require a subscription to access some or all of their contents, e.g. academic journal sites, and parts of many news sites. Because they require authentication to view its contents, they are technically an Intranet site. more... at Wikipedia
