The internet is a special place. It really is a virtual universe of stores, games, sports scores, articles, headlines, and a million other things.
Unique Attributes of the Web
Every person on the internet is pretty much anonymous. I can post a message to a bulletin board, and sign it with practically any name. That bulletin board may have messages from three different "people" who are all aliases for the same person.
As with so many things, this is both good and bad. It protects me from random attacks by people momentarily annoyed at my opinion, but it allows anyone to be rude without fear of consequences.
Also, because everyone's anonymous, I don't know who I'm dealing with. I may be arguing philosophy with an astute older gentleman, or a kid. I may discuss abortion with a woman who's already had one.
This is further hampered by the digital, ephemeral nature of everything on computers. We've all had documents disappear on us, to our great frustration. The same thing happens to websites. Whole communities can vanish literally in an instant. Many of the websites that I've built for other people have since been changed or abandoned. So, who am I online?
And things move fast. A new feature can be added to a website in a few days. So communities change, content appears and disappears, and before you know it, the web is not the same place it once was.
How It All Works
Very simply, the web is made of up two kinds of computers: servers, which have websites on them, and clients, which browse the web and get websites from the servers.
Every computer is hooked up to each other, and identified using an IP address, which is a set of four numbers separated by periods (like 148.105.22.103). There are also a few DNS servers on the internet, which translate IP addresses to the English domain names like www.google.com we're so used to seeing. So, a DNS server will take a request for www.yahoo.com, and will return the IP address of the server that hosts Yahoo!'s website.
How Web Pages Work
Each server hosts at least one website (most of them host many, many websites). A website is just a bunch of plain-text files that use a special formatting language called HTML to lay out the page. So, for example, here's an HTML webpage with a centered section at the top, and a bit of bold text:
<center>A Quote From Hamlet</center>
To be, or not to be, <strong>that</strong> is the question.
Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that.
A Brief Look at the Future
What's next for the web? Nobody knows, of course, but we can make a few educated guesses.
The web is becoming more ordinary, more of a platform for delivering pictures, movies, articles, etc. into the home. It's also evolving into an entertainment medium; even informational articles and shows include more entertainment than they used to.