Overview of the Web ----email me--------back to homepage.…old page, links ok?

Contrary to what the media would have you believe, the @World Wide Web did not spring into being overnight. Though relatively new in human terms, the Web has a venerable @genealogy for a computing technology. It can trace its roots back over 25 years, which is more than half the distance back to the primordial dawn of the electronic computing age.

However, the media is right in noting that the Web's phenomenal growth has so far outstripped that of any of its predecessors that, like a prize hog, it has left almost no room at the trough for any of them anymore. But like that prize hog, the Web is so much bigger and better and so much more valuable than the network technologies that preceded it, there is little reason to mourn the fact that they've been superseded.

In this chapter I'll discuss the history, development, and characteristics of the Web. You'll find out where it came from and what it's good for.

The Web came out of the @Internet, and it is both empowered and limited by the structure of the @Internet. Today, most @Web browsers include the capability to access other @Internet technologies, such as Gopher, e-mail, and Usenet news, as well as the World Wide Web. So the more you know about the Internet as a whole, as well as the Web's place in it, the better you'll understand how to exploit the entire Net to its fullest potential.

Then, too, the Web and the @Internet are more than just technology: they are an environment in which the members of an entire cyberculture communicate, trade, and interact. If you hope to establish your own Web site and make yourself a part of that culture, you'd better know what you're getting into. In a way, it's like moving to another country and trying to set up shop; if you don't speak the lingo and learn the customs, you'll never become a part of the community.

The Genealogy of the Web

In the late 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the @Department of Defense began to worry about what would happen to the nation's @communications systems in the event of an @atomic war. It was obvious that maintaining communications would be vital to the waging of a worldwide war, but it was also obvious that the very nature of an all-out @nuclear conflict would practically guarantee that the nation's existing @communications systems would be knocked out.

In 1962, Paul Baran, a researcher at the government's RAND think tank, described a solution to the problem in a paper titled "On Distributed Communications Networks." He proposed a nationwide system of computers connected together using a decentralized network so that if one or more major nodes were destroyed, the rest could dynamically adjust their connections to maintain communications.

If, for example, a computer in Washington, D.C., needed to communicate with one in Los Angeles, it might normally pass the information first to a computer in Kansas City, then on to L.A. But if @Kansas City were destroyed or knocked out by an @A-bomb blast, the Washington computer could reroute its communications through, say, Chicago instead, and the data would still arrive safely in L.A. (though too late to help the unfortunate citizens of Kansas City).

The proposal was discussed, developed, and expanded by various members of the computing community. In 1969, the first @packet-switching network was funded by the @Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).

So What's Packet Switching?

@Packet switching is a method of breaking up data files into small pieces-usually only a couple of kilobytes or less-called packets, which can then be transmitted to another location. There, the packets are reassembled to recreate the original file. Packets don't have to be transmitted in order or even by the same route. In fact, the same packet can be transmitted by several different routes just in case some don't come through. The receiving software at the other end throws away duplicate packets, checks to see if others haven't come through (and asks the originating computer to try to send them again), sorts them into their original order, and puts them back together again into a duplicate of the original data file. Although this isn't the fastest way to transmit data, it is certainly one of the most reliable.

@Packet switching also enables several users to send data over the same connection by interleaving packets from each data stream, routing each to its own particular destination.

Besides the original file data, data packets may include information about where they came from, the places they've visited in transit, and where they're going to. The data they contain may be compressed and/or encrypted. Packets almost always also include some kind of information to indicate whether the data that arrives at the destination is the same data that was sent in the first place.

ARPAnet, as it was called, linked four research facilities: the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the University of Utah. By 1971, ARPAnet had grown to include 15 nodes; there were a grand total of 40 by 1972. That year also marked the creation of the InterNetworking Working Group (INWG), which was needed to establish common protocols for the rapidly growing system.

For more on the history of the Internet, consult Bruce Sterling's excellent article on the topic at gopher://oak.zilker.net:70/00/bruces/F_SF_Science_Column/F_SF_Five_.

Because ARPAnet was decentralized, it was easy for computer administrators to add their machines to the network. All they needed was a phone line, a little hardware, and some free NCP (Network Control Protocol) software. Within just a few years, there were over a hundred @mainframe computers connected to ARPAnet, including some overseas.

Electronic Mail: The First Application

ARPAnet immediately became a forum for the exchange of information and ideas. Collaboration among scientists and educators was the number one use of the system, and the main incentive for new sites to want to be connected. Thus, it is not surprising that the first major application developed for use on the ARPAnet was @electronic mail.

With the advent of Ray Tomlinson's e-mail system in 1972, researchers connected to the Net could establish one-on-one @communication links with colleagues all over the world and could exchange ideas and research at a pace never before imagined. With the eventual addition of the ability to send mail to multiple recipients, mailing lists were born and users began open discussions on a multitude of topics, including "frivolous" topics, such as science fiction.

 

There are thousands of mailing lists you can subscribe to on the Internet today, covering topics as diverse as PERL programming and dog breeding. For a list of some of the many mailing lists available on the Net, check out Stephanie de Silva's list of Publicly Accessible Mailing Lists, updated monthly, at http://www.neosoft.com/internet/paml/, the list of LISTSERV lists at http://tile.net/listserv/, or the forms-searchable Liszt database of 25,000 mailing lists at http://www.liszt.com/.

 

You can find answers to most of your questions about @Internet e-mail in the @directory of e-mail FAQs at ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/mail/.

Deciphering @Internet e-mail addresses can be a bit challenging. Like a letter sent through the mail, an @electronic mail message must be sent to a specific address (or list of addresses). The format for an e-mail address is name@site (which is verbalized as "name at site").

The name portion of the address is the recipient's personal @e-mail account name. At many sites, this may be the user's first initial and last name. For example, my @e-mail account name is @mbrown. However, @e-mail names consist of anything from an obscure set of numbers and/or letters (70215.1034) to a funky nickname (spanky). (One nearly ubiquitous @e-mail name is @webmaster. This @generic name is used by Webmasters at most of the @Web sites in the world.)

The site portion of an @e-mail address is the @domain name of the server that the account is on. For example, all @America Online users are at @aol.com, and all @CompuServe users are at @compuserve.com.

If you don't know someone's e-mail address, there are a variety of "white pages" services available on the Web for looking them up. As always, a good list of such services can be found on Yahoo! at http://www.yahoo.com/Reference/White_Pages/. My current favorite is the Internet Address Finder at http://www.iaf.net/ (see .2).

For more information on Internet e-mail addresses, including lists of domain names for many popular online services, see John J. Chew's and Scott Yanoff's interactive forms-based "Inter-Network Mail Guide" at http://alpha.acast.nova.edu/cgi-bin/inmgq.pl.

.2

The @Internet Address Finder can be used to find the @e-mail addresses of over 3.5 million @Internet users.

Usenet News

Another important online conferencing system, BITNET (the "Because It's Time NETwork"), was started two years after Usenet at the City University of New York (CUNY). BITNET uses @e-mail and a group mailing list server (listserv) to distribute more than 4,000 discussion groups to thousands of users daily.

Although @BITNET traffic has peaked and is likely to be superseded completely by @Usenet at some time in the future, it still plays an important role in online conferencing.

Usenet Newsgroups

There are over 10,000 active Usenet newsgroups, all of which are organized into hierarchies by subject matter The seven major categories are as follows:

comp.

Computer-related subjects, such as programming, PC hardware and software, and database management.

sci.

Scientific studies, research, and applications.

soc.

Social issues, socializing, world cultures, and other social and sociological topics.

talk.

Debates and discussions mostly concerned with opinions or chat. Some cynics have suggested that the subjects in these topic groups are essentially "content-free."

news.

Groups concerned with Usenet, its administration, organization, and development.

rec.

Hobbies and recreation.

misc.

Everything else. Subjects include fitness, job hunting, law, and @investments.

There are also additional less-official groups that may not be carried by all @Usenet sites. The following are the three most popular:

alt.

For alternative. This category tends to attract the fringe elements, and topics range from sex and drugs to @conspiracy theories, UFOs, and @political anarchy.

gnu.

Discussions of the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation.

biz.

Business-related groups.

If you have a question about what a newsgroup is all about or what is appropriate to post, you can usually find a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) list that will give you the answer. Most of the @Usenet newsgroup FAQs are posted every month to the @newsgroup news.answers. Many @Web sites archive the most current @Usenet FAQs. ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/ is a good place to start.

In some Usenet groups, it's more important to stay on topic than it is in others. For example, you really don't want the messages in a scientific research group to degenerate into flame wars over which personal computer is best. To make sure this doesn't happen, many of the more serious Usenet groups are moderated.

In a moderated group, all posted articles are first mailed to a human moderator who combs through the messages to make sure they're on topic. Appropriate messages are then posted for everyone to see, while inappropriate messages are deleted. The moderator may even e-mail @posters of inappropriate messages to warn them not to repeat their indiscretions, or may lock them out of the @newsgroup altogether.

@Usenet is not the @Internet or even a part of the @Internet; it may be thought of as operating in parallel to and in conjunction with the Internet. While most @Internet sites carry @Usenet newsfeeds, there is no direct or official relationship between the two. However, Usenet news has become such an important part of computer internetworking that a @newsreader is now built into many @Web browsers (see .3).

.3

The definitive @online guide to @Usenet is the comprehensive list of @Usenet FAQs archived at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/usenet/top.html.

You can find @Usenet newsgroups of interest using the search form at http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/find-news. The Usenet Info Center Launch Pad at http://sunsite.unc.edu/usenet-i/ also offers a wealth of information on Usenet, including lists and indexes of available Usenet discussion groups.

TCP/IP

By the mid-1970s, many government agencies were on the ARPAnet, but each was running on a network developed by the lowest bidder for their specific project. For example, the Army's system was built by DEC, the Air Force's by IBM, and the Navy's by Unisys. All were capable networks, but all spoke different languages. What was clearly needed to make things work smoothly was a set of networking protocols that would tie together disparate networks and enable them to communicate with each other.

In 1974, @Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn published a paper titled "@A Protocol for @Packet Network Internetworking" that detailed a design that would solve the problem. In 1982, this solution was implemented as TCP/IP. TCP stands for Transmission Control Protocol; IP is the abbreviation for Internet Protocol. With the advent of TCP/IP, the word Internet-which is a @portmanteau word for interconnected networks-entered the language.

The @TCP portion of the TCP/IP provides data @transmission verification between client and server: If data is lost or scrambled, TCP triggers @retransmission until the errors are corrected.

 

You've probably heard the term socket mentioned in conjunction with TCP/IP. A socket is a package of subroutines that provide access to TCP/IP protocols. For example, most Windows systems have a file called winsock.@dllin the @windows/system directory that is required for a @Web browser or other communications program to hook up to the @Internet.

The @IP portion of TCP/IP moves data packets from node to node. It decodes addresses and routes data to designated destinations. The @Internet Protocol (IP) is what creates the network of networks, or @Internet, by linking systems at different levels. It can be used by small computers to communicate across a LAN (Local Area Network) in the same room or with computer networks around the world. Individual computers connected via a @LAN (either Ethernet or token ring) can share the @LAN setup with both TCP/IP and other network protocols, such as Novell or Windows for Workgroups. One computer on the @LAN then provides the @TCP/IP connection to the outside world.

The @Department of Defense quickly declared the @TCP/IP suite as the standard protocol for internetworking @military computers. TCP/IP has been ported to most @computer systems, including @personal computers, and has become the new standard in internetworking. It is the protocol set that provides the infrastructure for the @Internet today.

TCP/IP comprises over 100 different protocols. It includes services for remote logon, file transfers, and data indexing and retrieval, among others.

 

An excellent source of additional information on TCP/IP is the Introduction to @TCP/IPGopher site at the @University of California at Davis. Check it out at

gopher://gopher-chem.ucdavis.edu/11/Index/Internet_aw/Intro_the_Internet/intro.to.ip/.

Telnet

One of the driving forces behind the development of ARPAnet was the desire to afford researchers at various locations the ability to log on to remote computers and run programs. At the time, there were very few computers in existence and only a handful of powerful supercomputers (though the supercomputers of the early 1970s were nowhere near as powerful as the desktop machines of today).

Along with e-mail, remote @logon was one of the very first capabilities built into the ARPAnet.

Today, there is less reason for logging on to a remote system and running programs there. Most major @government agencies, colleges, and research facilities have their own computers, each of which is as powerful as the computers at other sites.

TCP/IP provides a remote @logon capability through the @Telnet protocol. Users generally log in to a @UNIX shell account on the remote system using a text-based or @graphics-based terminal program. With Telnet, the user can list and navigate through directories on the remote system and run programs.

The most popular programs run on @shell accounts are probably @e-mail programs, such as PINE; Usenet news readers, such as nn or rn; and text editors, such as vi or Emacs. Students are the most common users of Telnet these days; professors, scientists, and administrators are more likely to have a more direct means of access to powerful computers, such as an X Windows terminal.

A @Telnet session can be initiated with an @Internet computer using a stand-alone @terminal program, such as QVTNET on Windows shown here.

An excellent @online guide to @Telnet is located on the @University of Washington Library's site at http://www.lib.washington.edu/libinfo/inetguides/inet6.html.

FTP

The ability to transfer data between computers is central to the internetworking concept. TCP/IP implements @computer-to-computer data transfers thorough FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

An @FTP session involves first connecting to and signing on to an @FTP server somewhere on the Net. Most @public FTP sites allow anonymous @FTP. This means you can sign in with the user name anonymous and use your e-mail address as your password. However, some sites are restricted and require the use of an assigned user name and password.

Once in, you can list the files available on the site and move around through the directory structure just as though you were on your own system. When you've found a file of interest, you can transfer it to your computer using the get command (or mget for multiple files). You can also upload files to an FTP site using the put command.

The @FTP process was originally designed for text-only @UNIX shell style systems. But today, there are many @FTP programs available that go way beyond the original @FTP capabilities, adding windows, menus, buttons, automated uploading and downloading, site directories, and many more modern amenities.

 

One of the biggest lists of @FTP sites on the Web is the @Monster FTP Sites List at http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ftp/.

Using @Anonymous FTP to obtain @freeware and @shareware programs, @electronic texts, and @multimedia files remains one of the most popular activities on the Internet-so much so that @FTP capabilities are now built into most @Web browsers (see .5).

When accessing an FTP site using a Web browser, the URL will be preceded by @ftp:// rather than the http:// shown when you're viewing a Web site.

Individual files on an @FTP site are handled according to the way they are defined in your browser's configuration setup, just as though you were browsing a Web site. For example, if you're exploring an @FTP site and click the link for a .gif picture file, it will be displayed in the browser window. Text files and @HTML encoded files will be displayed too. If you have configured helper applicationsfor sound or video, clicking these types of files will display them using the configured helper applications. Clicking an unconfigured file type will generally bring up a @requester asking you to configure a viewer or save the file to disk.

Since you most often want to save files to disk from an FTP site, not view them, you can generally get around all this by using the browser's interactive option to save a file rather than display it. For example, in Netscape you can choose to save a file rather than view it by simply holding down the Shift key before clicking the file's link.

You might wonder, with hundreds of FTP sites on the Net and millions of files stored at those sites, how in the world can you ever hope to find the file you're looking for? Archie is the answer. Archie is a program for finding files stored on any anonymous @FTP site on the @Internet. The Archie Usage Guide at http://info.rutgers.edu/Computing/Network/Internet/Guide/archie.html provides an excellent overview of Archie, including instructions on how to find and hook up to Archie servers on the Net.

The complete list of @FTP-related FAQs is located online at
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/ftp-list/faq/faq.html.

Gopher

Along with e-mail, remote logon, and file transfer, information indexing and retrieval was one of the original big four concepts behind the idea of internetworking.

Though there were a plethora of different data indexing and retrieval experiments in the early days of the Net, none was ubiquitous until, in 1991, Paul Lindner and Mark P. McCahill at the @University of Minnesota created @Gopher. Though it suffered from an overly cute (but highly descriptive) name, its technique for organizing files under an intuitive menuing system won it instant acceptance on the Net.

@Gopher treats all data as a menu, a document, an index, or a Telnet connection. Through Telnet, one @Gopher site can access others, making it a true internetwork application capable of delivering data to a user from a multitude of sites via a single interface.

The direct precursor in both concept and function to the @World Wide Web, @Gopher lacks @hypertext links or @graphic elements. Its function on the Net is being taken over by the Web, though there are currently still several thousand Gopher sites on the Net, and it will probably be years before Gopher disappears completely. Because so much information is still contained in Gopher databases, the ability to navigate and view Gopherspace is now built into most @Web browsers (see .6).

When accessing a Gopher site using a Web browser, the URL will be preceded by @gopher:// rather than the http:// shown when you're viewing a Web site.

As Archie is to FTP, Veronica is to Gopher. That is, if you want to know where something is on any Gopher site on the Net, the Veronica program can tell you. For a connection to Veronica via the Web, go to http://www.scs.unr.edu/veronica.html.

Veronica is actually an acronym, though it is almost never capitalized as one should be. What does it stand for? Would you believe Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives?

The @Net's best Gopher sites are on the @Gopher Jewels list at http://galaxy.einet.net/GJ/.

For more about Gopher, consult the Gopher FAQ at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/gopher-faq/faq.html.

The Internet

With the near-universal changeover to TCP/IP protocols in the years following 1982, the word @Internet became the common term for referring to the worldwide network of research, military, and @university computers.

In 1983, ARPAnet was divided into ARPAnet and MILNET. MILNET was soon integrated into the Defense Data Network, which had been created in 1982. ARPAnet's role as the network backbone was taken over by NSFNET (the National Science Foundation NETwork), which had been created in 1986 with the aid of @NASA and the @Department of Energy to provide an improved backbone speed of 56Kbps for interconnecting a new @generation of research supercomputers. Connections proliferated, especially to colleges, when in 1989 NSFNET was overhauled for faster T1 line connectivity by @IBM, Merit, and @MCI. ARPAnet was finally retired in 1990.

In 1993, InterNIC (the Internet Network Information Center) was created by the National Science Foundation to provide information, a directory and database, and registration services to the Internet community. InterNIC is, thus, the closest thing there is to an @Internet administrative center. However, InterNIC doesn't dictate @Internet policy or run some huge central computer that controls the @Net. Its sole purpose is to handle organizational and "bookkeeping" functions, such as assigning Internet addresses (see the sidebar, "Domain Names").

Domain Names

Computers on the @Internet are referenced using IP addresses, which are comprised of a series of four numbers separated by periods (always called dots). Each number is an 8-bit integer (a number from 0-255). For example, the @IP address of my Web server at @Neural Applications is 198.137.221.9 (verbalized as "one-ninety-eight dot one-thirty-seven dot two-twenty-one dot nine").

However, because addresses composed of nothing but numbers are difficult for humans to remember, in 1983 the University of Wisconsin developed the Domain Name Server (DNS), which was then introduced to the Net during the following year. DNS automatically and invisibly translates names composed of real words into their @numeric IP addresses, which makes the Net a lot more user-friendly. To use the same example cited above, the DNS address of Neural's Web server is www.neural.com (pronounced "double-u double-u double-u dot neural dot cahm").

There is no formula for calculating an IP address from a @domain name-the correlation must be established by looking one or the other up in a table.

@Domain names consist of two or more parts, separated by periods (always, in Internet parlance, pronounced dot). Generally speaking, the leftmost part of the name is the most specific, with sections further to the right more general. A computer may have more than one @domain name assigned to it, but any given domain name will "resolve" into only one specific IP address (which is unique for each machine). Usually, all the machines on one network will share a right-hand and middle @domain name portion. For example, you might see computers at one site with the names:

The leftmost portion of a @domain name may indicate its purpose; for example, www. for a Web server or mail. for a mail server.

The @rightmost portion of a domain name often indicates the type of site it lives on. The most common domain name extensions are:

Other (generally two-letter) extensions indicate a site's country of origin, such as .ca for Canada, .de for Germany, or .fr for France.

 

The topic of @domain names is covered to the point of exhaustion in the @Usenet FAQ on the topic, which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/internet/tcp-ip/domains-faq/.

Your organization can get an IP address assigned by sending @electronic mail to Hostmaster@INTERNIC.NET. This service used to be free, but there is now a reasonable charge because of the tremendous growth of the Internet and the privatization of the process. For more information, point your browser to InterNIC's Web site at http://rs.internic.net/rs-internic.html.

One of the best @online guides to the @Internet as a whole is the @Electronic Freedom Foundation's Extended Guide to the @Internet at http://www.eff.org/papers/bdgtti/eegtti.html.

The Web Explosion

By 1990, the @European High-Energy Particle Physics Lab (CERN) had become the largest @Internet site in Europe and was the driving force in getting the rest of Europe connected to the Net. To help promote and facilitate the concept of distributed computing via the @Internet, Tim Berners-Lee created the @World Wide Web in 1992.

The Web was an extension of the @Gopher idea, but with many, many improvements. Inspired by Ted Nelson's work on Xanadu and the hypertext concept, the @World Wide Web incorporated @graphics, typographic text styles, and-most importantly-hypertext links.

The @hypertext concept predates @personal computers. It was first proposed by computer visionary Ted Nelson in his ground-breaking self-published book Computer Lib/Dream Machines in 1974.

In a nutshell, @electronic hypertext involves adding links to words or phrases. When selected, these links jump you to associated text in the same document or in another document altogether. For example, you could click an unfamiliar term and jump to a definition, or add your own notes that would be optionally displayed when you or someone else selected the note's hyperlink.

The hypertext concept has since been expanded to incorporate the idea of hypermedia, in which links can also be added to and from @graphics, video, and @audio clips.

The Web uses three new technologies: @HTML, or @HyperText Markup Language, is used to write @Web pages; a @Web server computer uses HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) to transmit those pages; and a @Web browser client program receives the data, interprets it, and displays the results.

Using @HTML, almost anyone with a text editor and an @Internet site can build visually interesting pages that organize and present information in a way seldom seen in other @online venues. In fact, @Web sites are said to be composed of pages because the information on them looks more like magazine pages than traditional computer screens.

@HTML is, itself, a subset of the much more complex @SGML, or @Standard Generalized Markup Language. @SGML is also used for creating pages on the Web, though it takes a different browser to be able to view SGML pages. @

HTML is a markup language, which means that @Web pages can only be viewed by using a specialized @Internet terminal program called a @Web browser. In the beginning, the potential was there for the typical computing "chicken and the egg problem": no one would create @Web pages because no one owned a browser program to view them with, and no one would get a browser program because there were no Web pages to view.

Fortunately, this did not happen because shortly after the Web was invented, a killer browser program was released to the @Internet community-free of charge!

In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana released Mosaic, a @Web browser designed by Marc Andreessen and developed by a team of students and staff at the @University of Illinois (see .7). It spread like wildfire though the Internet community; within a year, an estimated two million users were on the Web with Mosaic. Suddenly, everyone was browsing the Web, and everyone else was creating Web pages. Nothing in the @history of computing had grown so fast.

.7

@NSCA Mosaic, the browser that drove the phenomenal growth of the World Wide Web, is still available free of charge for Windows, @Windows NT, @Windows 95, @UNIX, and @Macintosh.

By mid-1993, there were 130 sites on the World Wide Web. Six months later, there were over 600. Today, there are almost 100,000 Web sites in the world (some sources say there may be twice that many). For the first few months of its existence, the Web was doubling in size every three months. Even now, its doubling rate is (depending on whom you believe) less than five months. Table 1.1 shows just how quickly the Web has grown over its three-year history.

Table 1.1 Growth of the World Wide Web

Date

Web Sites

6/93

130

12/93

623

6/94

2,738

12/94

10,022

6/95

23,500

1/96

90,000

If the number of @Web sites were to keep doubling at the current rate, there would be over 300 Web sites in the world for every man, woman, and child by the end of 1998. Clearly, this will not happen, but it does serve to illustrate just howfast the Web is expanding! See figure 1.8 for a graphical perspective.

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The @Internet is growing at a phenomenal rate as a whole, but the Web is growing so much faster that it almost seems destined to take over the whole Net.

 

For a wealth of both more and less accurate demographic information on the growth of the Internet in general and the World Wide Web in specific, begin with Yahoo!'s list of sites at http://www.yahoo.com/ Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Statistics_and_Demographics/. One good site to try is the @GVU WWW User Survey at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/user_surveys/User_Survey_Home.html.

Mosaic's success-and the fact that its source code was distributed for free!-spawned a wave of new browser introductions. Each topped the previous by adding new HTML commands and features. Marc Andreessen moved on from NCSA and joined with @Jim Clark of Silicon Graphics to found @Netscape Communications Corporation. They took along most of the NCSA Mosaic development team, which quickly turned out the first version of Netscape Navigator for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX platforms. Because of its many new features and free trail preview offer, Netscape (as it is usually called) quickly became the most popular browser on the Web. The Web's incredible growth even attracted Microsoft's attention, and in 1995, they introduced their Internet Explorer Web browser to coincide with the launch of their new WWW service, the Microsoft Network (MSN).

Established @online services like @CompuServe, @America Online, and Prodigy scrambled to meet their users' demands to add @Web access to their systems. Most of them quickly developed their own version of Mosaic, customized to work in conjunction with their proprietary online services. This enabled millions of established commercial service subscribers to spill over onto the Web virtually overnight; "old-timers" who had been on the Web since its beginning (only a year and a half or so before) suddenly found themselves overtaken by a tidal wave of Web-surfing newbies. Even @television discovered the Web, and it seemed that every other @news report featured a story about surfing the Net.

Increasingly, people are using the Web to conduct business. Today, over 50 percent of the sites on the Web are commercial (with a .com domain name). Over half of the users of the Web look for products at least occasionally and-since Web users are predominantly upscale, well educated, and affluent-business is paying attention. Expect Web growth in the near future to continue to be driven and driven hard by business expansion into cyberspace.

But Web surfers also use the Net for more traditional @telecommunications purposes. Three-fourths browse the Web. Two-thirds exchange e-mail. One third download software by FTP. One in three takes part in discussion groups, and one in five is active in multimedia.

Content

The @World Wide Web didn't get its name by accident. It truly is a web that encompasses just about every topic in the world. A quick look at the premier topic index on the Web, Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com,), lists topics as diverse as art, world news, sports, business, libraries, classified advertising, education, TV, science, fitness, and politics (see .9). You can't get much more diverse than that! There are literally thousands of sites listed on Yahoo! under each of these topics and many more.

.9

If you really want to know what's on the Web, you need look no further than Yahoo!

Presentation

But mere mass isn't the main draw of the Web. It's the way in which all that information is presented. The best @Web sites integrate @graphics, @hypertext links, and even video and audio. They make finding information interesting, fun, and intuitive.

Marshall McLuhan asserted that the medium is the message, and this is certainly true with the Web. Because its hypermedia presentation style can overwhelm its content if done poorly, the Web is a real challenge to developers. But when done well, the results are fantastic, such as the tour of an abandoned @US missile silo shown in

For more information about the World Wide Web, consult the WWW FAQ at http://sunsite.unc.edu/boutell/index.html.

HTML: The Bricks and Mortar of the Web

Now that you know where the Web came from, it's time to jump into the whole melange feet first-but with your eyes open. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is what you use to create Web pages, and it's the topic of this book.

@HTML is relatively simple in both concept and execution. In fact, if you have ever used a very old word processor, you are already familiar with the concept of a markup language.

In the "good old days" of word processing, if you wanted text to appear in, say, italics, you might surround it with control characters like this: 

/Ithis is in italics/I

The "/I" at the beginning would indicate to the word processor that, when printed, the text following should be italicized. The "/I" would turn off italics so that any text afterward would be printed in a normal @font. You literally marked up the text for printing just as you would if you were making editing marks on a printed copy with an editor's red pencil.

HTML works in much the same way. If, for example, you want text to appear on a Web page in italics, you mark it like this: 

<I>this is in italics</I>

Almost everything you create in HTML relies on marks, or tags, like these.

A Short Internet Glossary

Although you don't need to know every term that's bantered about on the Internet to be able to work, play, and develop on the Web, an understanding of a few key terms will help you to better understand what's going on there. Here's a short glossary of Internet and Web terms to help you get started.

For more on computer terminology, check out the Free Online Dictionary of Computing at http://wfn-shop.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/foldoc. If computer abbreviations and acronyms have you confused, seek enlightenment at BABEL, a dictionary of such alphabet soup at http://www.access.digex.net/~ikind/babel96a.html. But if you want become a real Net insider, you'll have to learn the slang; for that, check out the latest version of the legendary Jargon File at http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html.