Session I: The World Wide Web (WWW) 
First of all the WWW is part of the Internet, it is a subset of the Internet, it is not something different than the Internet.
The Internet is very much larger than just the World Wide Web.
It also uses the Internet infrastructure, the same telephone lines that we discussed previously.
One thing that differentiates the WWW is that it is very user friendly, which is nice
as a result of the WWW
rapid increase we have seen in Internet use over the past few years,
The other thing that marks the difference with the WWW is probably its most profound contribution to telecommunications is its use of hypertext
Hypertext allows you to click on a particular word or picture which will then take you to another paragraph or article or picture that relates to what you clicked on and as you will see this can be very powerful.
Another thing that the WWW allows you to do is
connect from one document on one computer to another document on another computer
previously you would have to log on to a remote computer
to find a particular file and sometimes it wasn't that easy to find the file that you were looking for.
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History of the WWW
It was developed at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory
used to communicate to each other
the first public use really was over the past 2 or 3 years.
The thing that really helped to make the WWW popular was the development of user-friendly WWW browsers.
And the
first one of those was developed at the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champagne and that was called Mosaic
developed by, the head of the team anyway, was Mark Andreason
Well, subsequently, Mark Andreason
formed his own corporation called
Netscape Communications and
developed a browser called
Netscape that was
based on the Mosaic browser.
and Netscape was released in December of 94
The release of Netscape probably marked the biggest increase in the use of the Internet that we have seen so far.
Then in August of 1995 another popular browser Internet Explorer was released.
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WWW Browsers
A few words now about what a browser can do:
As you might imagine, it browses the WWW.
But in addition to that it allows you to do e-mail,
allow you to do FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, as we discussed earlier
usenet news, which we will be discussing in more detail in the third section of Internet 101, and then finally, most browsers allow you to use what are known as multimedia plugins and controls
that allow you to see movies
all sorts of things that are very exciting.
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Uniform Resource Locators (URL's)
The slide you are seeing now shows you a URL. URL's are pretty important to understand when you are browsing the WWW.
A URL, which stands for Uniform Resource Locator, is the address that allows you to get to other resources on the WWW.
If you see a URL in a magazine or on TV you might need to enter it into the WWW Browser.
In this slide you will see the anatomy of a URL.
On the right hand side of the slide
you will see something that should look familiar to you.
There is a www at the beginning of it, which is a convention that is used for World Wide Web servers.
One the left hand side you will see a resource type. In this case
http stands for hypertext transfer protocol
Hypertext transfer protocol is probably the resource you will use 95% of the time on the WWW, however, there are other protocols like FTP, telnet, etc, that you might see occasionally, however, we are not going to discuss those here.
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Hyperlinks
So...this slide, you can see, there are a few hyperlinks on here and what you would do on the WWW is you would click on the blue underlined text and those would take you to some information related to that hyperlink. |
| Assignment Click HERE to go to the lab exercise. |
Previous: Session I (Part 2) Internet Basics
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