ITC Lecture Notes: Web intro -1

Working with the Web: Browser

Basics
T he World Wide Web (or WWW or Web for short) and the Internet are terms that are
often used as though they mean the same thing. Actually, the Web is only a portion of the
Internet. So let's start with finding out what the Internet is.

The Internet
The Internet is simply a network of computer networks. But there is nothing simple
about this network. Unlike most networks, the Internet is not under a central control.

From the beginning, the network was started by the US Department of Defense. The idea
was to have a network that could have big chunks blown up without losing the whole
network. It has many, many connections between the member networks and no one place
controls the whole network. In fact, there is no one "in charge" of anything about the
Internet except the assigning of addresses! It is amazing that thousands of people working
all over the world can manage to create such a huge system that actually works.

The original purpose of the Internet was to enable people in different locations to share
text-only documents.

Now there is much more you can do using the Internet like:
- Send and receive email messages;
- Search the world for particular files or for files that contain particular words;
- You can have a live conversation using typed text or voice or even video;
- Read electronic magazines and newspapers;
- Check on the weather forecast or the score of a ball game;
- Play computer games with several people at once;
- Post messages to newsgroups on a common topic;
- You can buy books, CDs, software, wine, or just about anything.
The WEB:
The Web is that part of the Internet that uses hypertext documents, also called Web
documents or Web pages.

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ITC Lecture Notes: Web intro -1

Words in hypertext are generally underlined and in a special color, like this. They have
an address attached to them so that clicking on the hypertext accesses the file at that
address. The file can be one that is on the viewer's own computer (like C:\My
Documents\letters\5-10-98 to mother.doc) or halfway around the world (like
http://www.microsoft.com/default.asp). Such text is called a hypertext link,
hyperlink, or just a link.

Web pages have come a long way from the original plain text documents. Now they can
show movies, play songs, and react to what the user clicks on in many imaginative ways.
It was only in 1989 that development began by CERN (the European Laboratory for
Particle Physics) on the beginnings of what became the World Wide Web. The physicists
wanted the ability to handle all Internet work though a single interface, to simplify the
sharing of documents between their widely scattered sites. By 1992 the system was
functioning well enough to publicize and invite others to move to the new approach. Very
quickly numerous browsers were developed for a variety of operating systems. The Web
soon became the most popular way to access the resources on the Internet.

HTML
Hypertext documents are written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language), a coding
language that does much more than just create hyperlinks. HTML code puts special
marks in a text document to tell browser software how to display the text. For example
<FONT FACE=ARIAL COLOR=#FF0000> means to use the font Arial and the color
red when displaying the text. The language's instructions are based on English. Each new
version of the HTML standards adds more formatting choices and the ability to do other
things like playing sounds and running animations.

HTML source code for a web page

One of the unique features of HTML documents is that the text wraps to the size of the
window. In a word processor the text will wrap to the size of the paper page. So a web

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ITC Lecture Notes: Web intro -1

page can fit in a wide variety of window sizes, monitor sizes, and resolutions without
making you scroll across the page.

Most people like to point and click on a hyperlink better than to type long addresses.
They like pictures better than plain text. This explains why the Web has rapidly become
so popular.

Address of a Web page

Each web page has a unique address called a URL, or Universal Resource Locator,
which tells where a file is located among all the computers that are part of the Internet. A
URL usually has three parts: protocol://domain/path

Example, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/downloads/default.asp

Protocol: tells the computer what kind of coding to expect.

For web pages the address always starts with http:// which stands for hypertext transfer
protocol. For a site that just downloads files you might use ftp:// which stands for file
transfer protocol. There are other protocols that you are less likely to use.

Domain: the unique name for the computer to which you are connecting.

All domain names have a 4-part number address like 207.46.130.150 but most have a
name using letters, too, like www.microsoft.com (which is much easier to remember!).
A dot character always separates the parts of a name.

The www stands for World Wide Web and is used for most web pages as the first part of
the domain name. The com part stands for "commercial" and is one of several extensions
allowed for the top level domain. Others include gov for government, edu for educational
institution, org for organization, mil for military, and net for network. It is common in
many countries to include the country identifier in the domain, such as .us for the United
States, .fr for France, or .ar for Argentina.

Seven new top-level domain names have been approved by ICANN (Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers): .pro, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .aero, and .name.

Path: is the list of folders on the computer, down to the actual file, like
/windows/downloads/default.asp If no file name is listed at the end of the path, the
browser will look for the default file, usually named index.html . If no such file is found,
the browser will try to show a list of the files in the last folder in the path. It may find that
it needs special permission or a password to show the list of files.

You can expect to see htm or html as the extension for most web pages. The extension
asp (Active Server Page) is used for a page that uses special codes from Microsoft in
addition to HTML. The extension shtml ( Secure HTML) is for pages that are encrypted
because they involve sensitive information like credit card numbers.

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ITC Lecture Notes: Web intro -1

The spelling and punctuation of an Internet address must be exactly right, including
the use of upper case letters. Many servers that handle web pages use the operating
system UNIX, for which myfile.htm, MyFile.htm, myfile.HTM are all different
names. Type carefully! A forward slash / is not the same as a back slash \. A colon :
and a semicolon ; are not the same. A comma , is not the same as . the dot character.

The Language of the Web

Did you notice that the address extensions are based on English, and the HTML code
uses English terms? Many English terms and phrases have been adopted as the standard
names for things having to do with the Internet, especially in HTML and in coding
languages like JavaScript. It is another special area of learning

You can find more materials on the Web in English than in any other language. Major
sites are rapidly building versions in the major languages of the world. But the primary
language of the Internet is English and many sites are available only in English. The more
English at your command, the more resources there will be that are available to you.

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