In this guide we will study the basic concepts of World Wide Web, links, browsers, web pages, Home page.

¿WHAT IS THE WWW?

The web is the most used service on the Internet. It is a system for communication and publication.

It was designed to distribute scientific information by computer networks in a system called Hypertext.

It was intended to allow information to be shown in page format, complete with text, graphics, illustrations, sound, video or any other medium required. The important ideas in a publication are linked to other pages by hyperlinks simply called links.

A link appears as a phrase or an image in a page, different from the rest of the text and images. A link could be an underlined word, in another colour, another font, or an separate from the rest of the information on the page. The user could 'surf or jump' (move) within Internet documents selecting these highlighted items by clicking on them with the mouse and moving to other related documents.

Note: Links are usually shown: in blue and underlined. Once visited, they can change their colour, usually to purple.

If you move your mouse in a hipertext page, you will see the arrow pointer change into a hand when you move over some graphics and/or highlighted word. That is a link! In order to use it (go see the page the link refers to) we only need to click on it.

The hand shows there is a link.

Link Try this link and you'll see that it points to the beggining of this document , therefore, the window 'jumps' to the top of this page.

Nowadays the web has millons of interelated documents or pages from the whole planet with the different kinds of media mentioned before.
These documents are stored in servers located all over the world. Internet is a client - server system. When we surf the web our computer is the client and the computer that publishes the Web pages is the server. As we go from one page to another, without realizing it, we may be using servers in Japan, U.S.A, then South Africa, etc......There are hundreds of thousands of servers!

In order to access the Web, we need a programme called Browser. The browser shows us Web documents and allows us to select it's links. Moving the mouse to a link and clicking it, the browser contacts the server and asks it for the required document.
In the page we can move just as in any other Windows 95/98/2000 document. If the page is bigger than the window it will have scroll bars. It could be diveded into sections, etc...
In these guides we will use Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer in our examples and there will be intructions for both of them.

WEB PAGES

The information that an organization or an individual (the server) puts on the WWW via the Internet for other users to access is called Web Page or Web Site.

When we browse a Web page, we usually find what it is called a Home Page. This is the starting point of a Web site. It is a sort of index or summary of everything that we will find on that server.

A site's Home page usually gives us a broad idea of what's on the site and it is a useful starting point to surf a site. A Web page can have one or many 'sheets'. 'Web Site' is the group of all the pages from one organization.

The Web page will be connected within it by means of it's links and it will also have links that connect it with other Web sites on other servers.

The browser always starts at the Home Page or Start Page of our browser, which is preset. This is the Web page we choose to appear when we connect to the Internet. Our browser's home page can be changed if we wish to and it may or may not be a home page in the internet. It could also be a local page (on our hard drive).

Activity

1 - Connect to the Internet. This browser starts in ............. home page (because we opened our browser and this is the preset web page).

2 - Examine the page without following a link yet. Use the scroll bar in order to see the entire page. Move using your mouse throughout the page, over graphics and/or highlighted words looking for links.

3 - Choose a link that you find interesting and click on it. You are surfing the Internet! You will see a sand clock appear next to the pointer and the machine will start processing (the Web Page is loading). Depending on how complex the Web page you selected is, it will show up quickly or it will take quite a while. Many times, pages show up bit by bit; first the text, then the graphics and then the 'multimedia effects'.

4 - Examine this new page well (using the scroll bars) and pay attention to how it contains differents links from the first one.
According to the chosen link there are three posibilities:

• you have gone to a completely different Web site. For example another page from another company, probably in another city or country.

• you are in a sub-page of the original site. Therefore you are still in the same server.

• you are in a section of the same page that wasn't seen because the page was too long to fit in the window. The link that sends us to a different section of the same page is called an anchor.

5- Choose another link and visit the page it takes you to.

You may have noticed the browser has toolbars with different buttons.
We will learn how to use some of them.

The Back button takes us to the previous page. You can also do this from the menu: Go - Back (in some browsers from the view menu) or by pressing Alt +

 

Navigator:

Explorer:

The Forward button takes us to the page we had come back from (using the back button). You can also do this from the menu: Go - Forward (in some browsers from the view menu) or by pressing Alt +

 

Navigator:

Explorer:

You will also notice that the visited links appear in a different colour. By this we know we have visited them

6- Use the Back button to return to the home page.

7- Close the browser.

The browser might disconnect from the internet automatically, but if it doesn't, we will have to do it manually:

• Go to the dialer icon (in the task bar) and double click on it.
  
  
• Choose disconnect.

Note: Find some 'Internet Addresses' that you would like to visit for the next guide.