lost in the web!

[mr. piper]

As far as i have read, the WWW was realised because it would maintain an unbroken link of communication in the event of global war, disasters etc.Is there a way of finding out which path a link you have made has travelled? if you see what i mean.

[OBonio]

Information on the internet travels shortest route first. There are usually many ways to get to the same place (IP address). To find out where your information is going to/coming from you can use tracert which will tell you the IP of every router along the way to the destination. Though the IP isn't 100% on physical location, specific subnets are given to countries so you can see which countries the info has travelled through. Have a look at VisualRoute or you can just use the tracert command from a command prompt (tracert www.google.co.uk would show you the route used to get to google for instace).

[redmug100]

The internet was invented for the reasons you described. The WWW was developed sometime afterwards.

[fo3nix]

you cannot find out the actual physical connections your data has been sent to, just the servers it goes between using tracert or other more advanced programs as OBonio has said.

On what redmug100 was saying, the WWW was invented by tim Berners-Lee, who was at the time in CERN (the particle physics accelerator near Geneva). It was invented to send data in a presentated way for other scientists to interpret etc. from the accelerator's experiments. Since then it's taken on a whole new life as you see now.

Current work is being made on a new, successor, to the web: the grid. This works in a similar way to the web, but allows for much greater data transfer. This is being built as it will be required for a new experiment that's currently being made in CERN, to be completed by around 2007.