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Comment by PNWChris | Hacker News Reader

I believe they’re referring to the web as port 80/443 http(s) traffic. It’s the old World Wide Web vs internet distinction, if you will.

Email really is just a protocol for message sending, and it lives on it’s own port with its own server. If you have an email client and access to an email server (POP/SMTP/however), you can use email over the internet but without the “web”.

Basically, the web email client ought not be the only email client.

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It was the ambiguity of the word 'web' that tripped me up. You still need a network of computers for email to be useful.

I don’t think you’ll find many people here who agree that “web” is ambiguous.

`Web`[0] is shorthand for `World Wide Web` which is specifically about HTTP/HTTPS and/or the applications built on that protocol. It is an entirely unambiguous word in this context.

`Internet`[1] is distinct, and that's the general purpose network of networks that you refer to which the Web is built on top of.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

Totally fair! Frankly, I only know the distinction from a high school computers teacher who was adamant about the distinction.

I guess the easiest way to get the name is to see the “Web” as a “web” of hyper text documents, where hyperlinks act as the strands in the web (graph edges, if you will).

Honestly, like you say, it’s all built on top of a computer network (yet another web/graph). As a consequence, the distinction never really made a ton of sense to me, either.

Alas, this is the common parlance, so it is what it is.

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