Expanded and revised Web version of an article
("Easy Mosaic")
for the November/December 1994 Cursor,
the Carnegie Mellon University Computing Services Magazine
Last updated on September 15, 1998
For the people who know that "all knowledge is on the Internet," that fact has always been a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it meant maybe you could, perhaps, find the data from the security of your own computer. A curse because you had to use FTP or Gopher ever so carefully to extract it. Sure, many of us used the Internet to transfer files back in the olden days, but was it ever fun?
Publicly-accessible articles, data, graphics, ephemeral, etc. have been liberated over the last few years by the development of the World Wide Web. While the Web is becoming a commercial phenomenon, don't forget that it started as a project in distributed document management by Tim Berners-Lee while he was working at CERN. trivia bit Meanwhile University of Illinois college student Marc Andreessen (trivia bit) wrote an easy-to-use graphic Web browser called Mosaic. A few years ago, Mosaic was the first popular Web browser, but things have changed dramatically. Now Netscape and Internet Explorer are the two primary browsers.
Now, if you can access the Web, you can go anywhere in cyberspace that's been linked to it. Best of all, when you're just wandering the Web, you don't even need to type in cryptic commands and path names, just select a hyperlink and click on it.
This article will introduce you to the Web, to browsers, and to Web pages.
The WWW is a huge, distributed, accessible, linked collection of documents, images and sounds. Some of the material we now take for granted as a Web site was was at an FTP or gopher site before the Web was even developed. Say you've been on the Internet for a while, following USENET newsgroups like rec.arts.movies, but you're new to the Web. You decide to follow the Internet Movie Database hyperlink.
This link provides interactive access to a huge movie database. This material had been developed originally as an FTP site. Thousands of rec.arts.movies readers have contributed to this site, by rating movies and by providing movie information. The data hasn't changed much, but its presentation on the WWW make it much easier to find and to use.
Things that make the WWW more interesting and more powerful than the traditional ASCII data on the Internet include:
Well, you've gotten this far with a browser - Congratulations!
On this Web page itself, you see underlined phrases which are links to other documents. Even after you select a link, you're not "lost in cyberspace," you can always return to the previous window by clicking on the Back button, usually found at the top of the screen.
When you point your cursor at a hyperlink and click on it with your mouse, the bottom of the browser window displays messages such as "Document: Done." A new Web page appears in the browser window This means that your server has successfully communicated across the Internet with the server that stores the other Web document. If you select this hyperlink, you will be accessing the World Wide Web Frequently Asked Questions document (or the WWW FAQ). This page is stored on a server is at Boutell.Com in Seattle (trivia bit) You're making a trip without leaving your computer.
But before you start digesting the WWW FAQ, take a closer look at your browser window. I'm assuming you're using Netscape because it's so widely-distributed.
Across the top of the browser window is the menu bar. Just under the menu URL window (labeled "Location" in Netscape).
The little broken lock at the bottom left of the screen is a security marker. Most of the time, it stays broken. However, when you browse a secure page using Netscape, the lock becomes solid. That means if you need to transmit secure data, like credit card information, your transaction should be secure (not hackable by a random Web user).
Before you begin, you might want to open an extra browser window, so you can keep this text in one window and visit new Web sites in another one. Just select the File menu at the top of the browser window and click on the New Web Browser menu option.
Since you've found this article, you've either stumbled over it on someone else's hotlist or from a search engine results page. That means you have the very basic fact down - you can find things on the Web.
Once you find things, then what? You want to be able to store a list of interesting places to visit. In Netscape, you can bookmark each of your favorite sites. If you select the Bookmarks menu from the menu bar, some of your bookmarks are displayed. Whenever you see a Web site that interests you, add it to your bookmarks by selecting the Bookmarks menu and selecting the Add Bookmark option. Days later, when you want to view the site again, just select the Bookmarks menu, and click on the bookmark to return to the site without typing in a lengthy URL.