The World Wide Web
Finding An Effective Internet Interface
The History of the World Wide Web
HTML
The URL
URL Components
WWW Schemes
|
PREV | TOP |
NEXT The World Wide Web Finding An Effective Internet Interface The History of the World Wide Web HTML The URL URL Components WWW Schemes |
|
In some capacity, the Internet has been in operation since the late 1960s. In 1983 there were 562 computers connected to the Internet. At the time of this printing, there were over 4 million different computers throughout the world with connections to the Internet. Each of those 4 million computers may provide services for multiple users. It is estimated there are more than 45 million people throughout the world who use the Internet.
The news media has been shining bright lights on the Internet recently because of an explosive increase in the amount of information available through the global network and because of how easy it is to obtain this information. The World Wide Web has become the user interface to the Internet.
Since the 1970s, if you were an active Internet user, there was a good possibility that you were also fairly proficient in navigating the Unix operating system. Unix was, for many years, the most popular operating system used to connect a site on the Internet because of the robust networking system it has. While Unix is a very powerful operating system, it was originally designed to be nothing more than a programming environment. While it is still a very popular operating system with many uses, its original design reveals itself in cryptic commands and a very non-user friendly interface, making it difficult to learn and frustrating to use.
Several noble attempts have been made in the history of the Internet, to provide Net users with an easy to use interface to network applications.
The first of these, still used at many Internet sites, was Gopher. Gopher provided a simple menu structure in which selections could be other menus, telnet connections (log on to a remote site), text files, sounds, and directories/phone books.
While Gopher solved many problems novice Internet users encountered, it was severely limited in its capabilities and its openness (or ability to improve).
Other attempts to produce effective Internet navigation tools also fell short.
The History of the World Wide Web
In March of 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher
then working at CERN, the European Particle
Physics Laboratory, submitted a proposal to his
superiors titled WorldWideWeb: Proposal for
a HyperText Project. In this proposal,
Berners-Lee describes a dilemma facing researchers
at CERN where valuable research information was being stored electronically on many
systems within the laboratory. While the information was technically available to many,
it was difficult to find any specific information, because of incompatible
computer systems and time-consuming navigation. Berners-Lee said this led to "waste
of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple
data lookup."
His proposed solution to this was a system of
Hypertext servers and client browsers. Using compatible servers
on incompatible computers, information could be
accessed in a single manner regardless of operating system
incompatibilities. Once servers were in place, hypertext
documents could be created. These documents could then
be access through the servers with client browsers,
programs which would display the document information
on a remote users terminal.
The hypertext element of the proposal was that items in
a document could be linked to other documents. This
is similar to the idea of putting footnotes in an essay
to show readers where they could find related information.
HTML
The language used to create hypertext documents for
use within the World Wide Web is HTML
(HyperText Markup Language). HTML documents are simple
text documents which have special markup tags within
them to indicate formatting specifications to a browser.
For example the following text:
Could be represented in HTML like this:
In this example, the word "exponential" is italicized.
A browser would italicize it because within the
HTML document, it is preceded by the
<i> tag, which turns italicization on, and is followed by the
</i>, which turns the italicization off.
A complete document is shown here. Note the use
of the tags to turn characteristics on and off.
The URL Since the World Wide Web works over the Internet,
a standard method of referencing information was
developed. This is the Universal Resource
Locator, or URL. The syntax for the URL is:
scheme://host.address/directory
/file For example:
URL Components The scheme component of the URL specifies what
kind of connection the browser should try to make.
This allows browsers to do more than just access
hypertext information. By using different schemes, a browser
can launch an additional program, or helper application,
to handle certain information (i.e. sound files, video,
etc.,) or handle the information differently.
Currently supported schemes include http,
ftp, gopher, telnet,
file, mailto, and news.
The second part of the URL is usually the host
name where the information resides. However, this is
not neccessarily the case when using certain schemes such
as mailto or news. In the above example, the URL
indicates the information referenced is located on the
host www.w3.org
The last part of the URL is the directory and file
specification of the information being referenced. The
URL shown above references the file
index.html which is in the
/hypertext/WWW/WWW directory at the
specified host.
Because of the nature of the World Wide Web,
new schemes can be added as resources and
applications
proliferate on the Net. Here we explain each of
the schemes mentioned above and the nuances
associated with each.
The Internet has seen growth of an
exponential magnitude.
This Internet has seen growth of an
<i>exponential</i> magnitude.
<html><head><title>For More Information</title>
<body><ul>
<li><a href="info1.html">
Info about Dogs</a></li>
<li><a href="info2.html">
Info about Cats</a></li>
</ul></body></html>
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/WWW/index.html
