The Internet is much disorganized because it represents the cooperative efforts of many institutions and individuals operating independently and contributing whatever they think might be useful. Because the Internet lacks a central directory, it can be difficult for inexperienced users and very time consuming for anyone to pull together resources related to a specific topic.

Mark Grape and Cindy Grape (1996) in their book Integrating Technology for Meaningful Learning stated that the World Wide Web (WWW) allows a variety of information sources to be interconnected through a special type of hypertext or hypermedia links. The information sources might be text documents, graphics, or even other Internet sites. The major advantage to educators and students of individual webs is that some one else has already done the work of locating and organizing meaningful collections of Internet recourses.

A Web might be thought of as a special type of publication. In some cases, the entire contents of an individual web are contributed by the web author. In other cases, a web consists of some material developed by the web author and connections to other recourses residing on other computers throughout the Internet. If you are able to find a web on a topic of interest, all you have to do is connect and browse through the resources that have been organized for you.

Special software, called a browser, is required to connect and interpret the protocol used by Web servers. Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer are presently the two most popular. For more information about Netscape or Microsoft Explorer, please, click here respectively, Netscape, Microsoft Internet Explorer.