A good architecture is not created in a vacuum. All design decisions at the architectural level should be made within the context of the functional, behavioral, and social requirements of the system being designed, which is a principle that applies equally to both software architecture and the traditional field of building architecture. site 
The World Wide Web has succeeded in large part because its software architecture has been designed to meet the needs of an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system.
A software architecture is an abstraction of the run-time elements of a software system during some phase of its operation. A system may be composed of many levels of abstraction and many phases of operation, each with its own software architecture.
An architectural style is a coordinated set of architectural constraints that restricts the roles/features of architectural elements and the allowed relationships among those elements within any architecture that conforms to that style.
The performance of a network-based application is bound first by the application requirements, then by the chosen interaction style, followed by the realized architecture, and finally by the implementation of each component.
Most software systems are created with the implicit assumption that the entire system is under the control of one entity, or at least that all entities participating within a system are acting towards a common goal and not at cross-purposes. Such an assumption cannot be safely made when the system runs openly on the Internet.
When individuals began publishing their personal collections of information, on whatever topics they might feel fanatic about, the social network-effect launched an exponential growth of websites that continues today.
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Roy goes on to develop the RESTful style of interaction which could be summarized as sensible use of GET and PUT of information identified by URI in the context of a shared network with embedded caches. page
Roy's final chapter is equally interesting as a snapshot of the web as of year 2000 from an insider with a decade of experience already and the careful analysis of the preceding five chapters. page
See RESTful Actually for another interpretation.