Linking

Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called dead links. The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive web sites. The Internet Archive, active since 1996, is one of the best-known efforts.
Dynamic updates of web pages
Main article: Ajax (programming)

JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich, then of Netscape, for use within web pages. The standardized version is ECMAScript. To overcome some of the limitations of the page-by-page model described above, some web applications also use Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). JavaScript is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse-clicks, or based on lapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response. Thus the server only needs to provide limited, incremental information. Since multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, users can interact with a page even while data is being retrieved. Some web applications regularly poll the server to ask if new information is available.
WWW prefix

Many web addresses begin with www, because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts (servers) according to the services they provide. The hostname for a web server is often www, as it is ftp for an FTP server, and news or nntp for a USENET news server. These host names appear as Domain Name System (DNS) subdomain names, as in www.example.com. The use of such subdomain names is not required by any technical or policy standard; indeed, the first ever web server was called nxoc01.cern.ch,[21] and many web sites exist without a www subdomain prefix, or with some other prefix such as "www2", "secure", etc. These subdomain prefixes have no consequence; they are simply chosen names. Many web servers are set up such that both the domain by itself (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to the same site, others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites.

When a single word is typed into the address bar and the return key is pressed, some web browsers automatically try adding "www." to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end. For example, typing 'apple' may resolve to http://www.apple.com/ and 'openoffice' to http://www.openoffice.org. This feature was beginning to be included in early versions of Mozilla Firefox (when it still had the working title 'Firebird') in early 2003.[22] It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only with regard to mobile devices.

The 'http://' or 'https://' part of web addresses does have meaning: These refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol and to HTTP Secure and so define the communication protocol that will be used to request and receive the page and all its images and other resources. The HTTP network protocol is fundamental to the way the World Wide Web works, and the encryption involved in HTTPS adds an essential layer if confidential information such as passwords or bank details are to be exchanged over the public internet. Web browsers often prepend this 'scheme' part to URLs too, if it is omitted. Despite this, Berners-Lee himself has admitted that the two 'forward slashes' (//) were in fact initially unnecessary[24]. In overview, RFC 2396 defined web URLs to have the following form: ://?#. Here is for example the web server (like www.example.com), and identifies the web page. The web server processes the , which can be data sent via a form, e.g., terms sent to a search engine, and the returned page depends on it. Finally, is not sent to the web server. It identifies the portion of the page which the browser shows first.

In English, www is pronounced by individually pronouncing the name of characters (double-u double-u double-u). Although some technical users pronounce it dub-dub-dub this is not widespread. The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," with Stephen Fry later pronouncing it in his "Podgrammes" series of podcasts as "wuh wuh wuh." In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng (万维网), which satisfies www and literally means "myriad dimensional net", a translation that very appropriately reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee's web-space states that World Wide Web is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalized, with no intervening hyphens