2.  What is the Web?

Jumping Right In

Let's start by taking a look at a few places on the Web. The list below is quite arbitrary, but deliberately does not include any Ohio schools, so that we can be less inhibited about pointing out their flaws!

Registrar's Offices

• Navarro College

• Duke University

• Hunter College of the City University of New York

• University of California, Irvine

• University of California, Riverside

• University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Simon Fraser University

Admissions Offices

• Landmark College

• Virginia Tech

• University of Maryland

• Ramapo College

• El Camino Community College

• Brandeis University

• Lesley College

Coming up for Air

Now that you have begun to see how to use Netscape to explore the web, we will take a deep breath and briefly discuss several basic concepts and perhaps add a few words to your vocabulary!

WWW (World Wide Web) Characteristics

• Hypertext:
  

  
  Links between related pieces of information can be

  • within a single document

  • between documents in different locations

• Multimedia:
  • text

  • related graphics

  • sound

  • movies

  • software files

  • database collections

• Interactive;

• One tool does all (web, gopher, FTP);

• Easy to use: mouse or arrow keys;

• Available from all kinds of computers: graphical browsers work on Macintosh, Windows, and engineering workstations; LYNX works to provide access to the text portion of the Web for people using terminals connected to timeshared systems.

Web Software

• The information on the web is displayed by cooperation between software running on the servers and software running on the personal system.

• The display software, running on your system, is often called the "browser."

What is a Home Page?

• Starting Point for each browser.
  • You set it for Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape.

  • System manager sets it for LYNX.

• Starting Point, or "Front Door" for each web server or related set of pages.

What are Bookmarks?

Bookmarks permit you to:

• Add a choice to your bookmark menu that will jump you directly to the screen you were looking at when you set the bookmark.

• Avoid having to remember and follow a sequence of links.

• Avoid having to remember and to type a web address.

• Be able to get to a web resource even if other machines or network links are down.

WWW Addresses:
URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

URLs have three parts, separated by slashes ("/"):

Resource Type

• gopher (URLs starting with "gopher://" - an older, text-only type)

• ftp (URLs starting with "ftp://" - to obtain text, data, or software)

• telnet (URLs starting with "telnet://" - to login to remote hosts)
  

Computer System Address

• Identifies the computer that stores this information;

• May include a colon and "port number" before the single slash (e.g., "/www.ohiou.edu:80/").

Location and name (path) of the file

• This part is often case-sensitive.

• This part may contain slash characters ("/ "), periods ("."), per-cent signs ("%"), or pound signs ("#"), in addition to letters and numerals. It will often start with a "tilde" character ("~"), which can be typed on most modern keyboards by shifting the key above the Tab key.

• URLs do not contain space characters.

Using a URL to go to a new location

• You have to tell your browser the URL of the page you want to jump to. The technique differs slightly among the browsers.

• Netscape and Microsoft Internet Explorer have an "Open" button on their toolbars.

• LYNX uses the single keystroke "G" for the "go to" command.

How do forms work?

Forms come in a variety of flavors, but they have the following common features:

• One or more fields to be filled out.
  • Some fields have a "pop-up" menu listing each of the allowed choices.

  • Some fields have "radio buttons" to be clicked to select between mutually exclusive choices.

  • Some fields have "check boxes" to be clicked to select one or more items.

  • Some fields have space for a single line of characters.

  • Some fields have space for large or unlimited blocks of text, with the ability to move around in them, revising your entry before submission.

• A submission button or link to select after completing the form.

We will look at one example, the Ohio University Class Schedule:

http://www.cats.ohiou.edu/~regoff/schedform.html

As we can suspect from what we see here, any time you submit a complex form, the information you entered is provided as input to a computer program running on the server, and the output is sent back to you as if it were an HTML file.

Finding Things on the Web

• Reference Librarians' professional skill is helping people find information; at Ohio University they have organized links to many tools on their web pages:

  http://www.library.ohiou.edu/

• There are many Web sites with search engines that allow you to look up words or phrases from resource titles, descriptions, or contents; typically, they generate hyperlinked lists of document titles, together with associated abstracts. See, for example, "Yahoo," and "AltaVista."

• When you search using an engine like Yahoo's, you are not searching the Internet itself. Instead, you are searching a database describing some portion of the contents of the Web. Only those sites included in the directory are available for search. Different search sites maintain different directories, and consequently give different search results.

Dick Piccard revised this file (http://ouvaxa.cats.ohiou.edu/~piccard/oacrao/web.html) on November 12, 1996.

Please send comments or suggestions to piccard@ohiou.edu.