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Web clients and servers communicate through Hypertext Transmission Protocol (HTTP). All Web clients and servers must be able to speak HTTP in order to send and receive hypermedia documents. For this reason, Web servers are often called HTTP servers. The phrase "World Wide Web" is often used to refer to the collective network of servers speaking HTTP as well as the global body of information you would use HTTP to access.

The standard language the Web uses for creating and recognizing hypermedia documents is the HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is widely praised for its ease of use. Web documents are typically written in HTML and are usually named with the suffix ".html" or ."htm". HTML uses what are called Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to represent hypermedia links and links to network services within documents. It is possible to represent nearly any file or service on the Internet with a URL.