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Frequently Asked Questions about the Internet
What is the Web?
The World Wide Web is the part of the Internet
that uses hypertext to link documents on computers
all over the world to one another. Hypertext allows
any part of any document to be linked to any other
document, no matter where it is, allowing for
intuitive, concept-based navigation.
Englishman Tim Berners-Lee invented the World
Wide Web in 1990 while working at CERN, the European
Particle Physics Laboratory. At first, the Web was
set up as a way for scientists to share information
with each other. It has since become a worldwide
success because it makes it very easy for computer
novices to browser through text, graphics, and
multimedia.
What is the Difference between the Internet and
the Web?
The Internet is a global telecommunications
network of linked computers that form a gigantic
repository of stored information. The Web is a means
of accessing, organizing, and moving through this
information. If the Internet is the New
York Public Library, then the Web is the Dewey
Decimal System. The Web is a subset of the Internet.
The Web is the part that works using hypertext;
there are other parts that work using other
protocols as well, such as gopher,
FTP,
IRC,
and Usenet.
What is Hypertext?
The term hypertext
was first coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 to describe a
series of interrelated ideas connected by
hyperlinks. The World Wide Web can be thought of as
one huge hypertext document with its component parts
connected by links. A hypertext browser allows you
to follow links with a simple mouse click.
What is a Browser?
A Web browser is a program or application that
provides an interface for accessing the World Wide
Web. Although graphics and multimedia are the
hallmark of the Web, the first Web browser, Lynx,
supported only text. The first graphical Web browser
that allowed pointing and clicking was Mosaic,
developed by Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Andreessen, an undergraduate at the time, would
later go on to fame and fortune as the developer of
Netscape Navigator. Mosaic was based on code written
by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN,
the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.
Web browsers have played a large part in
increasing the popularity of the Internet by pushing
its boundaries to include graphics, sound, and other
multimedia content, and by making it much easier to
use (even if it still has a long way to go). The
latest Web browsers allow you to send and receive e-mail,
as well as access Usenet
newsgroups. Currently, the two most popular
browsers are Netscape
Navigator and Microsoft
Internet Explorer.
Bookmarks and Favorites
Bookmarks (in Netscape Navigator) or Favorites
(in Internet Explorer) are shortcuts within your Web
browser to your favorite Web pages. When you land on
a page you think you might want to visit again,
choose "Add Bookmark" (or Favorite) in the
Bookmarks menu. Unfortunately, given the gargantuan
and eclectic nature of the Web, you may soon be in
possession of a list of Proustian proportions. By
selecting "go to Bookmarks" in Navigator,
or "Organize Favorites" in Explorer, you
can organize your Bookmarks into folders, creating
titles such as "search engines" or
"sports."
Tip: From your Bookmarks window, you can simply
double click entries or drag them into the Web
browser to open them directly. You also can drag a
Bookmark onto your desktop to create a shortcut
directly to that page. One double-click and you're
surfing your favorite site.
Cookies
A cookie, so named according to the official
Netscape specifications "for no compelling
reason," would be better described as a crumb.
Basically it's a piece of information left on your
hard disk by a site to help it keep track of you.
Cookies are used for a variety of reasons, from
keeping track of your purchases on a shopping site,
to tracking your clicks through a site, to
remembering a site-specific username and password
for you. Usually cookies are harmless.
If you're curious about how often you receive
these little Web snacks, and you're using Internet
Explorer, you can try this little experiment. Go
into Options under the View menu and select the
"Advanced" tab. Then, check the box that
says, "Warn before accepting cookies."
You'll probably want to turn this off after you see
just how many cookies you're getting (turns out your
browser gets fed like Elvis on a bad day), but it is
interesting to see how often your browser is being
fed unbeknownst to you.
What is a URL?
Look up at the top of your browser window. See
that thing that starts with http://? That's the URL
for the page you're on. URL stands for Uniform
Resource Locator, the unique address assigned to
each page on the World Wide Web. URLs are the
addresses your browser uses to find information
located on another computer and to retrieve the
corresponding HTML
(or Web) pages situated on that server. You usually
don't have to worry too much about them, but if
you're curious about how to interpret
them, we can help.
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