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Using the World Wide Web: A Beginning Course for the Community Auburn High and Middle School Connecting to the Web You connect to the World Wide Web (WWW) through one of two ways: You have a direct connection to an Internet service provider. An example would be Auburn High and Middle School, where a high-speed T1 line brings the Internet to the building. You will need a either a fairly modern Macintosh computer or at least a 486 Windows computer. Each of these computers must have an ethernet card, which helps your machine communicate through the direct line to locations on the Internet. Make sure your computer has at least 8Mb of ram memory. You have a dial-up connection to an Internet service provider, such as the
Blacksburg Electronic Village, NRVnet, or InfiNet. You will need the same kind
of computer as Using Web Browsers A browser (such as Mosaic or Netscape) is a special, often free, piece of software which typically brings a "home page" to the screen that you have specified. This could be a page developed locally, or it could come from a computer in a foreign country. On this page can be text, images, and even places (buttons) on which you can click to hear sound or see video clips. You tell your browser what page you want to see by either typing in a URL address for that Internet site, or by clicking on an underlined word or words (or on some images) which takes you to a pre-determined site. What are some examples of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators)? The URL http://www.whitehouse.gov takes you to the famous White House Web page. The portion "http" (hypertext transport protocol), followed by a colon (:) and two forward slashes indicates that what comes next is an address for a World Wide Web site and page. Sometimes you will find a forward slash at the end of the URL address. It means that you are going to access a particular page (called index.html). For example, try this URL: http://www.bev.net/ - The Blacksburg Electronic Village home page Sometimes, an address does not start with "http://" but with a term such as "telnet." Here is an example: telnet://spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov Telnet is used to "switch to another computer" somewhere in the world. Netscape Toolbar and Directory Buttons
Browse: Browse the web to explore areas of interest to you. * Use a single mouse-click to select any hypertext link that is blue.
Toolbar buttons Back Displays the previous page in the history list. A history list references a hierarchy of pages you've already viewed. Forward Displays the next page in the history list. When you use Back or a history menu item to retrieve a page, using Forward gets the proceeding page. Forward is only available after you use Back or a history item. Home Displays the home page designated in the General Preferences|Appearance panel. Reload Redisplays the current Netscape page, reflecting any changes made prior to the original loading. Images Loads images into pages. This is useful when the Options|Auto Load Images menu item is unchecked and icons have been substituted for images. By loading images, you replace the icons with the intended images. Open Lets you enter a URL to display the specified page in the content area. Print Prints the content area of the current Netscape page. characteristics. Find Lets you specify a word or phrase to locate within the current Netscape page. If a match is found, the text is selected and displayed. Stop Halts any ongoing transfer of page information. Directory buttons (These buttons can also be accessed from the Directory or Help menus) What's New? what's new on the Internet What's Cool? what's cool on the Internet Handbook Netscape Navigator Handbook online Net Search directory of Internet search engines Net Directory master directory of other Internet directories Software information on Netscape Navigator software upgrades Netscape Menu Choices The menus at the top of the screen allow you to make choices as you navigate
the Web. File Edit View Go BookMarks Options Directory Window Searching the web There are several ways in which you can search for information on the World Wide Web. Many times, you will see an URL in a magazine or newspaper, or hear about it from a friend. Just type it into the proper window in your browser and press the [RETURN] or [ENTER] key. You can use an "information index." This index is made up of directories and subdirectories that take you to specific Web resources using point and click menus. Here are examples for you to try: Web search engines http://www.bev.net/about/research/ntia/search.php Netscape's internet search page http://wp.netscape.com/escapes/search/ntsrchrnd-G.html?cp=ntserch& Specific search engines: Yahoo at Stanford University http://www.yahoo.com Kids Web at Syracuse University http://www.npac.syr.edu/textbook/kidsweb/ Try one of the many "search engines" which are free on the Web. A
search engine is an online InfoSeek http://www.infoseek.com Lycos, from Carnegie Mellon University http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu WebCrawler, by America Online http://www.webcrawler.com Web Hot Spots You will also want to build a collection of your favorite World Wide Web sites. Try the following interesting and information-rich sites, most of which contain multimedia resources. Interesting sites set-up for this class http://www.bev.net/about/research/ntia/community.php The Virginia Tech Library http://www.lib.vt.edu/ General resource locations: Exploratorium http://www.exploratorium.edu Library of Congress http://lcweb.loc.gov Publishers' Catalog Home Page http://www.lights.com/publisher Smithsonian Institution http://www.si.edu Thomas Legislative Information on the Internet http://thomas.loc.gov White House http://www.whitehouse.gov Education resource locations: AskERIC Virtual Library http://ericir.syr.edu JASON Project http://www.jasonproject.org/ Web66: A K-12 World Wide Web Project http://web66.coled.umn.edu Beginner's Guide to URLs What's a URL? A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator. Think of it as a networked extension of the standard filename concept: not only can you point to a file in a directory, but that file and that directory can exist on any machine on the network, can be served via any of several different methods, and might not even be something as simple as a file: URLs can also point to queries, documents stored deep within databases, the results of a finger or archie command, or whatever. Since the URL concept is really pretty simple ("if it's out there, we can point at it"), this beginner's guide is just a quick walk through some of the more common URL types and should allow you to be creating and understanding URLs in a variety of contexts very quickly. File URLs Suppose there is a document called "foobar.txt"; it sits on an anonymous ftp server called "ftp.yoyodyne.com" in directory "/pub/files". The URL for this file is then: file://ftp.yoyodyne.com/pub/files/foobar.txt The toplevel directory of this FTP server is simply: file://ftp.yoyodyne.com/ The "pub" directory of this FTP server is then: file://ftp.yoyodyne.com/pub That's all there is to it. To point to a Usenet newsgroup (say, "rec.gardening"), the URL is simply: news:rec.gardening Currently, network clients like NCSA Mosaic don't allow you to specify a news server as you would normally expect (e.g., news://news.yoyodyne.com/rec.gardening); this may be coming down the road but in the meantime you will have to specify your local news server via some other method. The most common method is to set the news server in the Preferences under Options. HTTP URLs HTTP stands for HyperText Transport Protocol. HTTP servers are commonly used for serving hypertext documents, as HTTP is an extremely low-overhead protocol that capitalizes on the fact that navigation information can be embedded in such documents directly and thus the protocol itself doesn't have to support full navigation features that the FTP and Gopher protocols do. A file called "foobar.html" on HTTP server "www.yoyodyne.com" in directory "/pub/files" corresponds to this URL: http://www.yoyodyne.com/pub/files/foobar.html The default HTTP network port is 80; if a HTTP server resides on a different network port (say, port 1234 on www.yoyodyne.com), then the URL becomes: http://www.yoyodyne.com:1234/pub/files/foobar.html Partial URLs Once you are viewing a document located somewhere on the network (say, the document http://www.yoyodyne.com/pub/afile.html), you can use a partial, or relative, URL to point to another file in the same directory, on the same machine, being served by the same server software. For example, if another file exists in that same directory called "anotherfile.html", then anotherfile.html is a valid partial URL at that point. This provides an easy way to build sets of hypertext documents. If a set of hypertext documents are sitting in a common directory, they can refer to one another (i.e., be hyperlinked) by just their filenames -- however a reader got to one of the documents, a jump can be made to any other document in the same directory by merely using the other document's filename as the partial URL at that point. The additional information (access method, hostname, port number, directory name, etc.) will be assumed based on the URL used to reach the first document. Other URLs Many other URLs are possible, but we've covered the most common ones you might have to construct by hand. At the top of each Mosaic document viewing window is a text field called "Document URL"; if you watch the contents of that as you navigate through information on the network, you'll get to observe how URLs are put together for many different types of information. The current IETF URL spec is here; more information on URLs can be found here. mosaic@ncsa.uiuc.edu Internet terminology introduced ftp The file transfer protocol; a protocol that defines how to transfer
files from one computer to another. HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) The transmission standard used to send HTML documents across the World Wide Web. hypertext Text that is highlighted or underlined. By clicking on this text is interlinked to jump freely from one topic or document to other resources on the WWW: text, graphics, audio, video. link The text or graphic used in an HTML document to jump from one document to another. listserv A special tool where e-mail messages are sent from one person to everyone who has subscribed to a listserv group. When anyone in the group posts a message to the listserv, the user can reply to that person or to everyone subscribed. To subscribe to a listserv, you must send a message to the computer housing the list. To subscribe to a list, send the message to listserv@computer.domain.name , leave the subject line blank, and in the body of the message say: subscribe listname YourFirstName YourLastName For example, to subscribe to the listserv edtech, send a message to listserv@msu.edu , leave the subject line blank and in the body of the message type: subscribe edtech Sally Laughon USENET newsgroup USENET is an informal, rather anarchic, groups of systems that exchange news. Network newsgroups is a way to take part in worldwide discussions on a plethora of topics, yet keep them organized and separate from your e-mail. Netscape One of the browser programs (client program) available to access the World Wide Web (WWW). The WWW was developed in 1990 by researches at CERN,. the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. It is designed to link all online documents together using hypertext. protocol A protocol is just a definition of how computers will act when talking to each other. Protocol definitions range from how bits are placed on a wire to the format of an electronic mail message. Standard protocols allow computers from different manufacturers to communicate; the computers can use completely different software, providing that the programs running on both ends agree on what the data means. telnet A terminal emulation protocol allowing the user to log into other computers. Also a client program that allows remote login to other computers.
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