When is a website not a website?

The words "web" and "internet" tend to be used interchangably by most people- however, they are technically two very different things.

The internet is hardware- a physical network of computers, all connected to one another and communicating using a set of open standards (including TCP and Internet Protocol.) The "web" is software- a virtual network of interlinked documents, built on a set of open standards (including the HTML, CSS and Javascript.)

The internet dates back to the ARPANET project of the 1960s, when computers were large, expensive machines with several terminals, so that they could be used by a number of people at the same time. Before the internet, people who used more than one computer needed a seperate terminal for each machine; by networking the computers, users could access 2 or more different machines from a single terminal. (There are also networks using the same technology but not connected to the internet; these are usually called intranets, creating a clear distinction between the two.)

The Web is much more recent, dating back to the 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee found himself with access to a network to hundreds of computers, but needing to know how each one of the hundreds of computers worked in order to actually access the information on them. He started the World Wide Web project as a way to solve that problem, by creating a platform that allowed information to be shared over different computers, regardless of their hardware, operating system and software. Although the World Wide Web operates over the internet, web technologies can be used over an intranet; technically, there's no distinction.

In other words, the difference between the Web and the Internet is a little like the difference between a currency and a banknote; although they are both closely related, one is an abstract concept, and the other is a physical object.

To push the financial analogy (I'm not an economist, so this could be dangerous ground for me to tread), lets say that I were to create my own currency— let's call it Some Random Dollar— and to say that it is worth exactly the same as the British pound, so I'd happily sell SRDs for one pound each; I wouldn't even charge commission.

But as shops don't accept them, it would seem that nobody would want it. (Like Scottish banknotes, only more so.) On the off chance that anyone would accept it, they would be far less likely to have trouble spending British Pounds than Random Dollars, so would obviously prefer not to. However, take a step into Random World, my wonderful theme park in a hidden location in Britain, where all the shops have to follow my rules; here, shops will only accept Random Dollars. Suddenly, the Random Dollar has a use, and people have a need for Random Dollars, so they buy a few to spend in the shops. Only now, it becomes clearer that I won't change people's money back; I'll sell Random Dollars to people with Pounds, but I won't buy them back again.

If you suddenly found yourself in Random World, you'd probably want to get out and into the world where you can spend your money more freely. When you found that your Random Dollars weren't all they cracked up to be, you'd probably want to get your "real" money back.

My Random Dollar currency is kind of like British Pounds- they cost the same, they can be spent in shops, but it's quite clear that they aren't the same thing.

So what's this got to do with the web? Well, as I mentioned, one of the ideals of the web is that it's device independant- it shouldn't matter what browser you're using to look at a web page, and you shouldn't need to know anything about the server the page is being delivered by.

The W3C's specifications for HTML allow "objects" to be embedded into a page- for example, a Flash animation might be embedded to make a page more interesting, or music might be embedded in a page. However, some websites rely on those embedded objects— say, if Flash is used to create a website's navigational menu (so that you can have pretty animations when your mouse hovers over a menu item), which renders the website unusable if you can't see or access the Flash object.

With a site like this, if you went out and bought the latest computer and installed the latest web browser, you wouldn't be able to see it without installing additional software. Or, more to the point, a different device (like a mobile phone) with a fully functional web browser wouldn't be able to see them because the software needed hasn't been written for it.

Meanwhile, Microsoft are also in the process of rolling out a project called Silverlight— a competitor to Adobe's Flash. It's only available for Windows and Mac OSX- there's no sign of any Linux support from Microsoft. Windows 95 is no longer supported by Microsoft, so it's unlikely that older machines with that operating system will ever be able to see web pages which rely on it.

Should sites like these, which rely on more than simply a web browser on the client's machine, be called "websites"?

You could even take it a step further, and consider "normal" HTML/CSS websites which only work in Internet Explorer in Windows, because they rely on components that are only in the Windows operating system, such as ActiveX controls. (Such as those you get when you export a Microsoft Access report as an HTML page.) Or to take it to the next step, where the devlopers have built a layout that works in Internet Explorer, but fails to function properly on a standards-compliant browser…

The point is; should we be making a clearer distinction between the World Wide Web and the Internet, and calling sites which rely on proprietary plugins like Flash something other than "websites", saving the term for pure HTML/CSS/ECMAscript sites?

Realistically, it's never going to happen, but I think it's interesting to ponder on what we'd call them instead.