The (W)orld (W)ide (W)eb

(This article will introduce you to the Web, to Netscape and to homepages. It covers the versions of Netscape that reside on most PC's and MAC's)

What is the WWW and what makes it so Powerful?

Basically, the WWW is a huge, distributed, accessible, linked collection of documents, images and sounds. Much of the material has resided on the computers for years but has only recently become easily publically accessible. For example:

http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/

This link provides interactive access to a huge movie archive. If you've followed rec.arts.movies, you'd know that this material had lived at an FTP site at Cardiff. Although available for years, this web link greatly increased the number of individuals that visit the archive.

The data content hasn't changed much, but the information is much more accessible. Things that make the WWW more interesting and more powerful than the traditional ASCII data on the Internet include:

Formatted Text and Graphics

Formatted text is easier to read than straight ASCII, and being able to attach graphics gives the document creator much more flexibility.

Ease of Use

Netscape is very easy to use. Once you add a few starting points to your hyperlink list or hotlist, you can avoid typing in path names for anything. Further, if you want to learn HTML (the mark-up language that most WWW documents are stored in), it's easy and there are a number of net-resources available to teach you.

Links and Hypertext

Creating links between material on different sites gives Web site developers enormous flexibility in building their sites. It gives the users an easy way to organize data on the Internet for their own use. Using linked documents to create your own reading paths can help you moreeasily find what's important to you and ignore the rest. Furthermore, instead of always having to download and maintain odd bits of data at yoursite, you can link to it at another site and use it when you want it. Creating hyperlinks helps to ensure that you'll always access the newest version of the material.

Interactivity You'll find forms, windows to create database searches, and all kinds of interactive material on the WWW. You can create links to graphics, text, sounds, databases.

User Involvement

You can add to the Web just about anything you'd like to add (that's not already under someone else's copyright). Be creative, be bold, get involved.

NETSCAPE COMMANDS

• Back - Displays the last page you looked at. You can select this button at any time.
• Forward - Displays the page linked to the text you've selected. This button is not always operational, but is useful for revisiting pages.
• Home - Displays the default home page (the Netscape Home Page is the default home page for much of campus). You can select this button at any time.
• Open - Displays a pop-up window. Type the name of a URL to open and select OPEN. You should always type the URL here because the Document URL line at the top of the page on many browsers does not accept input from the keyboard.
• Save As... - Saves the currently-displayed URL to a specified path. A menu appears, displaying paths in your current directory to which the document could be saved. The document can be saved as plain text (ASCII) or as an HTML document..
• Reload - Refreshes the current display. Useful if you're editing an HTML file and wanting to view the results.
• Find - A prompt will appear asking for a word or phrase to search for in the document. Its location (if found) will be found and highlighted

Information Services, Central Computing
University of Missouri Kansas City