The Wonderful World of the Web

THE WONDERFUL If you read anything about the Information Superhighway, most probably they’re talking about the World Wide Web on the Internet. The Web, as it is commonly called, is the fastest growing commercial area on the Net. According to the latest figures, the numbers of Web sites are doubling every month, twice the rate of growth of the Internet itself. When electronic commerce gets a foot hold in cyberspace it will most probably be on the Web. There are secure Web servers and Web browsers in development, most using public-key cryptography from RSA Data Security Inc. in Redwood City, California, to facilitate the sending of secure information on the Web; such as credit card numbers. The Web was developed by Tim BernersLee in 1989 at the CERN particle physics lab in Cern, Switzerland, in an effort to help physicists, scattered around the globe, collaborate. This worked well and the use of the Web remained in the domain of the scientists until 1993 when Web clients for Windows and Macintosh machines were developed. When that happened, the use of the Web took off. For those of you not familiar with the Web, the Web is nothing more than a document viewed with a Web viewer program (client). The most popular viewer, or client, is NCSC (National Center for Supercomputing Center) Mosaic. NCSC Mosaic, developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois, is available entirely for free via ftp on the Internet (Anonymous ftp:ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu> Programs can be found in the Mosiacl directory; or phone: + 1 217 244-4130. There are also a number of commercial versions of Mosaic available: Netscape, NetCruiser, and Internet-in-a-Box, are just a few. The two things that sets the commercial versions apart from the free version is the availability of easy to reach technical support and the enhancements the commercial versions have. Each Web document is made up of a number of Web pages. These pages, which include graphics, sound, and video clips, reside on a computer

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running a Web Server program. Each Web page can have pointers to other Web pages, much like a hypertext help file that you would find in a number of Windows or Macintosh programs. However, these pages may or may not be on the same computer as the previous page, they could be on other computers in other countries. With this type of linking of pages, viewing what seems to be a continuous document, could, in actuality, be getting information from computers all over the world. Yet to the viewer, it looks like one document. This interdocument page linking can result in a user being bounced all over the world while viewing a single document. This is global criss-crossing from page to page. If you drew lines on a map showing the computer to computer connections necessary to access the pages, after a while it would start to resemble a web; hence the name, ‘World Wide Web’. Web pages are written in a language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is a super simple language to learn because it is just a small series of text marking commands that are embedded into an ASCII text file. Yet, consultants are charging thousands of dollars to set up Web Home Pages for companies. A Web Home Page is the first page a user sees when he links to a company or organization’s Web Serve:. To get a company or organization’s home page, all a user needs to know is the Universal Resource Locator (URL) code for the home page. For example, the URL for the United States’ White House is
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University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee: chttp://www.memphis/egypt/ egyptlhtml) The famous Trojan Coffee Room at the University of Cambridge, UK, where you can see the level of the coffee pot in the computer lab real-time:
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