There has been a continuous battle over the years with regard to browser market share. Initially, Mosaic enjoyed the largest share of the market, later to become Netscape's Navigator only to be challenged and eventually surpassed by Microsoft with various versions of Internet Explorer. Less well-known browsers such as Opera and Mozilla exist but relatively few people use them. In fact there are literally hundreds of browsers available in minority usage which raises compatibility issues for website creators. One browser, notorious among website creators was the AOL browser which is no longer used. Early Web interfaces were purely textual, requiring...

The Web as it is known colloquially, functions according to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Hypertext is perhaps the Web's most important feature for it enables all web content to be linked. Web pages are created as plain text code written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is based on the ASCII code set. This set of tags is used to define the layout, structure and style of web content. Once uploaded onto the Web, a website can be viewed by anyone connected to the Internet. The goal of HTML was simple: to create cross-platform compatibility. The idea was...

The Internet was born out of a military research project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) in the 1960s, whose goal was to devise a way of successfully transmitting information across large distances in the event of a nuclear attack. To do this it needed to "packet-switch" data via many computers from the host to the recipient. The protocols which define the rules for this information exchange were termed: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and ensured that the information that was carried over the ARPA network could not be interrupted by an enemy attack. Following the...

"Bandwidth (the width of a band of electromagnetic frequencies) is used to mean (1) how fast data flows on a given transmission path, and (2), somewhat more technically, the width of the range of frequencies that an electronic signal occupies on a given transmission medium. Any digital or analog signal has a bandwidth" (What Is?, 2002). In digital systems, bandwidth is expressed as data speed in kilo/bits per second (k/bps). Long before the Web was invented, connections to the Internet were made using modems . Modems began with download speeds of 2.4 to 9.6 kbps, then 14.4, 28.8, 33.6 and,...