World Wide Web is the part of the Internet that provides sounds, pictures, and moving images in addition to text. The Internet links computers and computer networks around the world, but the portion of the network not on the World Wide Web (often called the Web, for short) contains only text information. The Web, however, has multimedia capabilities--including graphics, audio, and video. The Web is made up of electronic addresses called Web sites, which contain Web pages that hold the multimedia information. Web sites and their pages reside in computers connected to the Internet.

Another major feature of the Web is hypertext. Hypertext enables a user to jump from one document to another--even if the documents are stored on different parts of the Internet. For example, in a Web site concerning space exploration, the words space shuttle might be highlighted. Clicking on these words would bring information about the shuttle to the screen. Pictures, too, can be used as hyperlinks (hypertext links). Words and pictures that hyperlink to other documents are called hot spots. Hot spots and their hyperlinks are created by the author of a Web page.

Excerpt from the "World Wide Web" article, The World Book Encyclopedia © 1999