What is the Web and how does it work?
The web was initially conceived and created by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer specialist from the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in 1989 to provide a collaborative knowledge-sharing tool to support scientific work in an international context. He and his partner Robert Cailliau created a prototype web for CERN and released it to the Internet community for testing and comments.
The web is not the internet. Actually, the web is one way to utilize the infrastructure of the internet. The web we know today is under the guidance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that is a volunteer organization based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with the responsibility for developing and maintaining common standards.
Perhaps the single most important technological development in the history of the web, besides the creation of the web itself, was the development of graphical browsers in the early 90s. Beginning with NCSA's Mosaic and its evolution into Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, these programs allowed users to browse the resources on the web in an extremely user friendly environment.
How do you connect to the Internet?
The most common ways to connect to the internet are either through an Internet Service Provider (ISP) or an Online Service (like AOL). The connection is made by using a modem inside of your computer or in an external box. Dial-up modems are connected to a phone line and broadband modems with a cable connection, satellite connection, or a DSL high-speed phone connection. The reason a modem is necessary is that a computer and the transmission lines use two different technologies. A computer is digital, meaning it can only work with information that is in concrete, countable pieces (bits). The telephone lines are analog, meaning they work with information (like sound) that is infinite, flowing and uncountable. A modem has to modulate and demodulate the information between the two systems. The modem on the sending end turns the digital information into analog information so it can go over the phone lines; the modem on the receiving end turns analog information into digital information so the computer can understand it.
An Online Service provides access to the Internet, but it is not the Internet or the Web. When you log in as a member you are not yet on the web. Essentially, you enter a big department store and make choices of services that are offered, like email, chat rooms, etc. The service, like America online, provides a link to the Internet. You can get a "direct connection" through an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ISP has a computer called a server that is connected to the Internet 24 hours a day with a very fast connection. You log in to their service and connect directly to the Internet.
What's on the Internet?
Besides the vast number of websites, there are other parts to the Internet.
Newsgroups are groups of people around the world with common interests. There are about 54,000 newsgroups. People in each group "post" their news on the Internet, kind of like pinning a message on a bulletin board, and everyone in the group can read it and post their own answers, comments, or questions.
Mailing lists, or Listservs, are similar to newsgroups except instead of posting messages on a bulletin board, you get email delivered to your box. Once you join a mailing list, any email message sent by anyone on the list automatically goes to everyone else on the whole list. In an active list, this can mean lots of mail.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Excite have huge databases that keep track of billions of web pages. You can search for almost any kind of information.
BLogs (web logs) are web-based publications that range from personal diaries and commentary to corporate newsletters, network news, and professional information. Blogs are often provided in a format that allow anyone to subscribe and to choose how often to automatically check for newly posted comments.
Podcasts are audio files you can listen to on your computer or copy to an MP3 player. You can subscribe to podcasts and have your computer check for new episodes. Podcasts range from occasional, personal episodes to regular, professionally produced programs.
On the web, you get around from page to page through Links. These links are called hypertext: text that is "connected" to other pages so when you click on the hypertext, you "jump" to another page.
On the web, you can usually recognize links by their underlines, and they are usually in a contrasting color. Graphics can also be links. But even if the text does not follow the convention of an underline and different color, and even if a graphic does not have a colored border, you can always tell by the browser hand: when the pointer on the screen is positioned over a link, the pointer turns into a little hand. This is your visual clue that if you click, something will happen (usually you jump to another page).
Web adresses, URLs
Every page on the web has an address, just like we have addresses for our homes and businesses. This address is called the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. The abbreviation "URL" is usually pronounced by its initials: you-are-ell.
http://www.faculty.fairfield.edu/mediacenter/tl_110/what_is_web.html
http:// - This stands for hypertext transfer protocol. The important thing is that this part of the URL is what tells you that the file you are looking for is a page on the World Wide Web. Instead of http:// in some URLS you might see rtsp://, ftp://, or other abbreviations. These refer to other files that are not ordinary web pages.
www. - This www stands for World Wide Web, but it's really just a convention; that is, www is not the part of the address that means the file is a web page. Some URLS do not have www in their address.
faculty.fairfield.edu - This is the domain name. It tells you who owns the site. You can buy domain names.
/mediacenter/tl_110/what_is_web.html - After the domain name, the rest of the address is just a path telling the browser where to find the page you need. For instance, in this address, the browser finds faculty.fairfield.edu, and the slash tells it to look inside the faculty.fairfield folder and find a folder or directory called mediacenter, then another directory called tl_110. Then the last slash tells it to look inside that tl_110 folder and find the file called what_is_web.html. All web pages are called "html files".
The period you see in URLS is pronounced dot. So faculty.fairfield.edu is pronounced faculty dot fairfield dot edu.
The slash, /, in an address is always a forward slash, so you don't need to say "forward slash:' Just say "slash:'
This character, ~, is a tilde (pronounced till' duh). It's not very common in English words, but shows up in web addresses a lot. To type it, press Shift ~ (usually found in the upper-left corner of the keyboard).
This character, _ , is the underscore. Type it by pressing Shift Hyphen.
In the domain name portion of the address (the first part, from www through .com), whether you type capitals or lowercase is not critical. However, after the first slash, the rest of the address is case-sensitive, meaning it is extremely important whether you type capital letters or not. If the address has a capital letter (after the first slash), you need to type a capital letter or the browser will not find the page.