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'The web' is a way funner way to refer to the internet. Why did we abandon it?

Khanimus

Khanimus

Avenger
Oct 25, 2017
40,212
Greater Vancouver
I mean "the internet" maybe sounds more clinically correct, but 'the web' just evokes something more.

Like getting caught in a big sticky mess that you can't untangle yourself from as a giant fucking multi-limbed monster comes down to drain you of your blood. Y'know, like the internet.

I miss when the internet was dumber and not so... y'know... horrifying.


wIg.gif
 
nsilvias

nsilvias

Member
Oct 25, 2017
23,790
its not much of a web anymore with how consolidated it has become. hell google search is literal trash now. past the first 2 pages its just spam and indexing sites
 
Why would you do that?

Why would you do that?

Member
Oct 25, 2017
4,801
New York City
Technically the Web (short for World Wide Web / WWW) is just one service you can access on the Internet.

The Internet is actually more than 10 years older than the Web. People emailed, posted on newsgroups, shared filed over FTP, etc. over the Internet before the Web was a thing.

In fact, here's a Newsgroup post from 1991 written by the creators of the Web, shortly after the Web was created. It describes what the Web is and how it works, it provides a download for the first Web browser, and it has a link to the first ever web page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
 
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KtSlime

KtSlime

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,910
Tokyo
I don't think we abandoned it, it's still used fairly often and is part of many words. However it's not the entire Internet, so I won't say I'm on the web if I am sending a message on Discord, or ordering something from the Amazon app or watching Netflix on the TV.
 
KtotheRoc

KtotheRoc

One Winged Slayer
Member
Oct 27, 2017
56,664
Is this a Spider-Man reference because it feels like a Spider-Man reference. 😝
 
Strings

Strings

Member
Oct 27, 2017
31,419
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
 
Neobunch

Neobunch

Member
Nov 21, 2017
225
It'll live on for as long as you keep typing 'www.' before a site's name. You can look at the third 'w' and know that, yep, the web is still there.
 
KimiNewt

KimiNewt

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,749
KtSlime said:
I don't think we abandoned it, it's still used fairly often and is part of many words. However it's not the entire Internet, so I won't say I'm on the web if I am sending a message on Discord, or ordering something from the Amazon app or watching Netflix on the TV.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Technically these all use HTTP so I don't see how they're not a part of the web
 
Sabretooth

Sabretooth

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,067
India
The Web (at least World Wide Web) is not a synonym for the Internet, afaik, even though it was used that way a lot because of the web's prevalence.

I guess part of the reason for the term's downfall was the rise of apps and services that, despite using the web as a backbone, essentially make you stop thinking of the web. If anything, I feel like most of these services actively discourage you from leaving their site or app. I feel like as far as most people are concerned, the only web people use in the conceptual sense these days is to google something they need to know.
 
L Thammy

L Thammy

Spacenoid
Member
Oct 25, 2017
50,044
It's more like the Web became so widely used that there's really no longer a point to referring to it distinctly anymore. It's just what we conceive of the Internet as now.
 
deimosmasque

deimosmasque

Ugly, Queer, Gender-Fluid, Drive-In Mutant, yes?
Moderator
Apr 22, 2018
14,215
Tampa, Fl
The World Wide Web is what we see actively when using devices to access the internet which is the infrastructure that keeps it running at all times.

So when using your phone or computer or other device to access the internet, you are on the web. But the concept itself is more accurately termed the internet.
 
Rendering...

Rendering...

Member
Oct 30, 2017
19,089
The Web and the Internet are specific terms that are independent of the vagaries of popular terminology.

The Internet is a global network consisting of many resources and services, such as email and file sharing protocols. It predates the Web by decades. The World Wide Web is just one system on the Internet, a piece of a broader whole. The Web is the collection of interlinked visually formatted resources that are identified and accessed by URLs, and dependent on the HyperText Transfer Protocol. You know, websites.

Probably only professors and crotchety tech professionals care about using these words with precision, but it's kind of interesting to know regardless.

BTW the Internet is a proper noun because an internet is a series of networks while the Internet is the giant global collection of such networks. Only huge nerds are allowed to use the capitalized version though.
 
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Carnby

Carnby

Member
Oct 25, 2017
12,238
I'm old enough to remember when commericals always said "www dot" before the name of their website.
 
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