Surfing the Internet: Introduction
What is the Internet?
The Internet connects locally connected computers to other computers all over the world. Local client software receives information from remote server software and makes it available.
Examples of Server/client software are:
E mail: Sending and receiving text messages between computer accounts on the net.
Telnet and TN3270: A terminal emulations which allow "logging on" to accounts on remote computers.
FTP: File Transfer Protocal software allowing the sending and receiving of files between computers.
What is WWW?
WWW is the World Wide Web. The concepts of the WWW were first developed at the European Particle Physics laboratory CERN in 1989. The Web is a system of information distribution using the Internet. It is a global hypertext system of linked documents written based on a set of rules called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). These documents can contain both text and non-text (graphics, audio, video) material. Embedded links allow jumps both within a single document, and between documents on the same computer or on other computers anywhere on the net, Computers linked to the net exchange documents based on the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
Browsing Documents on the WWW
WWW Browsers are clients which can retrieve and display WWW documents based on the rules laid down by HTML. The explosive growth of the WWW can be attributed to the release into the public domain of NCSA Mosaic, a web browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Other browsers followed, both public domain, and commercial products. Today, Netscape (a commercial product created by many of the developers of Mosaic) appears to be the browser of choice.
An Introduction to Using Netscape
See Links in the Status Line
Whenever your cursor passes over a link, the status line at the bottom of the Netscape window will show its URL (Universal Resource Locator); a kind of address. This can be very useful.
Following Links Backward to Where You Came From
To get back to the document from which you came, click the Back button on the Netscape toolbar.
How to Stop a Transfer in Progress
To stop a link transfer that is in progress, click the Stop button. on the toolbar.
Adding Bookmarks
If you want to keep a record of an interesting place, Click on Bookmarks and then Add Bookmark. The current document will be added to the Netscape list of bookmarks. Do this often!
At any time you can click on Bookmarks, and the click on a target bookmark to retrieve that document.
A Brief Sample of Places to Go
multimedia teaching
Back to the WWW