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There are many different resources available on the Internet. The newest and most interesting one is called the World-Wide Web (WWW). World Wide Web is made up of hundreds of thousands of interconnected pages, or documents, which can be displayed on your monitor. Each page can have connections to other pages, which may be held on any computer connected to the Internet. For example, if you wanted some information about India, you could start by viewing a page highlighting the history of the India. When a particular state was mentioned, you could click its name to bring up another page containing information about that state. History The WWW originated from a specification created in 1991 at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory based in Geneva, Switzerland. The original idea was to allow physicists and other scientists to share information with full multimedia support. The Internet tools then available required considerable expertise with the Internet, so a new method of both transferring and displaying information was created. The transfer method is named HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and it runs primarily over TCP/IP, the standard Internet networking protocol. HTTP works using the standard Internet setup, where a server issues the data, and a client displays or processes it. (Since clients are used to navigate the Internet, they are commonly referred to as browsers. The browser we will concentrate on is called Mosaic.) The information to be transferred is created using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML documents are made up of standard text, as well as formatting codes, which indicate how the document should be displayed. The WWW client has to read these codes in order to display the document. For those of you who want to create your own HTML documents, you can refer to Appendix A for a description of the most frequently used formatting codes. After CERN established the specifications for the WWW, people began writing WWW client and server software, thus forming the WWW as we know it today. What is HyperText ? The World-Wide Web is based on the concept of hypertext, a term originally coined by Ted Nelson in the late 1960s. Hypertext is very similar to ordinary text, except for one important aspect: Connections to other parts of the text, or even to other documents, can be hidden behind words and phrases. These connections, called hypertext links, allow you to read the document in any order that makes sense to you, the reader. You are not confined to reading something from beginning to end. Many of you will be familiar with a common form of hypertext, the on-line help system in Microsoft Windows. In the Windows help system, users can jump from topic to topic by clicking highlighted words or phrases with the mouse. Hypertext represents a complete departure from traditional documents, like a book for instance, in which the only link between similar topics is the index. If you were reading a hypertext version of this book, a mouse click on the word "FTP" could bring up several different documents related to FTP, such as a description of the FTP protocol or a sample FTP session. Another mouse click would allow you to return to your original location. Learn More | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
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