Web-site

Web Site, in computer science, file of information located on a server connected to the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW is a set of protocols and software that allows the global computer network called the Internet to display multimedia documents.

Web sites may include text, photographs, illustrations, video, music, or computer programs. They also often include links to other sites in the form of hypertext, highlighted or colored text that the user can click on with their mouse, instructing their computer to jump to the new site.
Every web site has a specific address on the WWW, called a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

These addresses end in extensions that indicate the type of organization sponsoring the web site, for example, .gov for government agencies, .edu for academic institutions, and .com for commercial enterprises. The user’s computer must be connected to the Internet and have a special software program called a browser to retrieve and read information from a web site. Examples of browsers include Navigator from the Netscape Communications Corporation and Explorer from the Microsoft Corporation.

The content presented on a web site usually contains hypertext and icons, pictures that also serve as links to other sites. By clicking on the hypertext or icons with their mouse, users instruct their browser program to connect to the web site specified by the URL contained in the hypertext link. These links are embedded in the web site through the use of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a special language that encodes the links with the correct URL.

Web sites generally offer an appearance that resembles the graphical user interfaces (GUI) of Microsoft’s Windows operating system, Apple’s Macintosh operating system, and other graphics based operating systems. They may include scroll bars, menus, buttons, icons, and toolbars, all of which can be activated by a mouse or other input device.

To find a web site, a user can consult an Internet reference guide or directory, or use one of the many freely available search engines, such as WebCrawler from America Online Incorporated. These engines are search and retrieval programs, of varying sophistication, that ask the user to fill out a form before executing a search of the WWW for the requested information.

The user can also create a list of the URLs of frequently visited web sites. Such a list helps a user recall a URL and easily access the desired web site. Web sites are easily modified and updated, so the content of many sites changes frequently.