The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (or short: WWW) is an inhomogenous, worldwide system of networked computers with the ability to exchange and display data in different formats. WWW is defined through these exchange capabilities and through a rather content-oriented than layout-oriented document description language named HTML. A technical description and the history of the system can be found at [1].

The term 'inhomogenous' among other aspects refers to:

• differences in network speed and reliability depending on the computer's location
• graphics capabilities of these computers vary in resolution, color, monitor or printer quality and memory
• different WWW browsers (programs that download and present a WWW document) are being used and present documents in different and user-custumizable ways
• local preferences set arbitrary colors and font sizes and omit graphics

In particular, a variety of cultures, designs and huge differences in quality level appear on the Web. Every organization or person with Internet access can easily create Web pages, read pages world wide and publish without a publisher.

Many on-line presentations lack quality as the individuals in charge of them are more likely to be computer system administrators than magazine designers or graphic designers.

As more and more businesses, schools, government agencies and individuals start publishing on-line, a basic knowledge about the limits and strenghts of computer graphics is a must for graphics designers.