Internet and World Wide Web are terms that are generally used synonymously but there are much different in actual meaning.

How are they Different ?

The term Internet evolved from Inter-Networking. It is a massive super-network of millions of networks built all across the globe. It actually represents the overall network infrastructure comprising of Fibre optic cables, routers, switches, gateways, computers among other network constituents. Every node(computer) on internet is accessible by every other node connected to the Internet and that’s how Internet is primarily used for communication and Information sharing.

There are some well defined Internet protocols for performing several purposes such as data transfer, remote access, information sharing using Internet. ‘World Wide Web’ employs Hyper Text Transfer Protocol(HTTP) to facilitate Information sharing on Internet. In other words, ‘Web’ is simply an Information sharing model, built on top of the internet.

In simpler words

‘World Wide Web’ (WWW) or simply ‘Web’ is basically a subset of Internet. It represents the largest sub-network on Internet, which employs HTTP protocol and lets us access information published on a Webpage via a software called a Web browser.

Similar to World Wide Web, there are other sub-sets of Internet as well such as

• e-mail (Protocols: SMTP,POP,MAPI)
• FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
• Telnet (Remote login)

When you’re using an Instant Messenger (IM) for an online chat, you’re actually using Internet but not the World Wide Web.