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Net Basics: World Wide Web |
One of my professors in management college introduced us to
the concept of being intelligently lazy. This principle though,
was used by scientists over 8 years ago, CERN, a Swiss research
institute. Tired of using difficult programs, hard-to-remember
commands, and boring interfaces to access information from the
Net, researchers at CERN developed Web technology - a single,
simple mechanism for information retrieval, regardless of the
type of computer and the type of Internet resource. As another
great man (I can't really take credit for everything) once said,
"Necessity is the mother of invention."
As soon as CERN established specifications for the Web, software
to easily access these documents on the Internet was developed,
making the World Wide Web (WWW) a very user friendly place, and
increasing the number of users. The research brains at CERN basically
linked documents on the Net together using a funda called hypertext.
Imagine you are reading a book. When you come across a footnote,
you jump to that page to get more information about that topic.
After reading up on that topic, you return to the part where you
left off. If that footnote refers to another book, you pick that
book, read up that particular section, and then come back to the
first book. A tedious process, right ?
The Web makes the same procedure child's play. If you're reading
the same book on the WWW, instead of a footnote, you'll have a
hypertext link. When you click on that link, you're automatically
transported to another document with more detailed information
on that subject. Often, this document is actually on another computer
in another continent - and because this all happens in the background,
you won't even realise all this is happening.
What does the web have to offer you ? News, humour, audio, video, recipes, free software, and information on topics from the bizarre toe sucking fetishes to more serious financial, technical and medical information. Everyone else would have already talked about the bad stuff on the Web, so we'll skip that.
And finally before I log out this time, here are some common
Web related terms for you to throw around to impress others :
BROWSERS: Programs for searching and viewing sites on the World Wide Web. Netscape and Internet are two popular examples of graphical browsers. Lynx is used for text only browsing.
URL: Uniform Resource Locator specifies an address of an Internet document. (eg. Http://www.timesofindia.com)
HTML: HyperText Markup Language is the language used to create web pages.
HTTP: HyperText Transport Protocol is the method used to transfer
HTML documents on the Web.