The Web

Three of the most fundamental and powerful features of the Web are its:

- capacity to incorporate all types of media objects (video, sound, images, text, etc.) into a single document;

- utilization of hypertext or hypermedia-oriented architecture in which a single document has embedded links to other documents, which can exist locally or anywhere in the world; and

- ability to span the depths of heterogeneous client/server platforms. One can view from any client platform (DOS, UNIX, etc.) a data object stored on virtually any server platform.

The Web is a great technology for sharing content and facilitating communications. The Web is a collection of protocols and standards used to access information available on or off the Internet. Web technology does not require connection to the Internet. In fact, many organizations have embraced the technology for internal use only. For internal Web servers (Intranets), the domain of accessible information is restricted to the local or wide area network. On the other hand, connecting it to the Internet, gives one access to the world. The relationship between the Internet and the Web is symbiotic: the Internet provides the universal connectivity that makes the World Wide Web (WWW) possible and the Web has provided the powerful user model and has garnered the attention that is making the Internet ubiquitous.

Most content on the Web consists of static pages written using an editor capable of applying the HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) codes that control a Web page's presentation format, including hyperlinks to other pages or Web sites. The emergence of HTML formatting codes that enabled the use of input forms on Web pages triggered efforts to integrate databases and the Web. Instead of being mere information recipients, Web users can now send data to the Web server. Integrating databases also lets Web pages present dynamic information obtained by querying a database. Opportunity for bidirectional data flow and dynamic output make the Web an attractive medium for conducting business with clients/customers, and for broadcasting database resident information not only on the Web, but also on internal enterprise networks.

While the WWW may be the Internet's best-known (but not the only) medium to publish information for external consumers, it has also become an increasingly common vehicle for distributing data in-house over corporate networks called "Intranets". The Intranets use Web servers, Web browsers, and HTML documents as a means to publish enterprise information such as employee phone lists, policy manuals, events and news alerts, and so forth. Web browsers are simple to learn and use, and more and more people have this skill, so many MIS departments have capitalized on this simple and well-known interface.

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