Frequently Asked Questions
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How does the Web work? A web page is the part of the Web you see; it is made up of links, images, navigation tools, text, and sometimes video or sound. A link, which can be text or a graphic, is a gateway to another web page anywhere on the Internet. A group of related web pages compose a web site. Web sites are housed on a server, which is a computer designed to "serve" or deliver
the files to the user in the web page format. The Web is made up of an interdependent network of servers
world-wide which your computer connects to.
What's the difference between the Web and the Internet? The World Wide Web is one of the many facets of the Internet. It allows browser software (such as Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer) to display media-rich content (such as sounds, pictures, and video) from the network on the fly. The web employs hypertext, which allows any page of the Web to be linked to any other quickly and easily. You can view a page stored in California and then link to a page in New Zealand. Hypertext is just text that contains links to other documents on the Web. These are the words, phrases, or graphics which, when clicked on, jump you to other documents elsewhere on the Web. Usually, links appear colored, underlined, and/or highlighted to make them stand out from the rest of the text. The Net also contains a whole galaxy of resources and services, which use older tools such as Gopher
(a precursor to hyperlinked documents which uses a menu system much like the explorer in Windows), FTP
(a method of transferring files), telnet (a way of logging into remote computers on the Net), and WAIS
(which lets you search for files on the Net using keywords or phrases). Most of these old tools have
now been subsumed by the Web (e.g., you can use Gopher and FTP through your web browser). However,
some of them (notably IRC and Usenet) have refused to be assimilated.
What is an Intranet? Intranets also allow companies to set up technologies that broadcast messages to their employees such
as company news or announcements.
What are HTML Documents? Tags are commands included in the
HTML file that direct the browser to perform such operations as text formatting (e.g., bold, italic,
font face,text
color),
page layout, and other design elements (e.g., graphics, tables, multimedia).
What is a web browser? Some aspects of the appearance can be controlled by you in your browser's options menu. For instance, you can change the font and its size, tell the browser whether or not to show buttons and toolbars, or set which page you see first when you launch your browser. Take a few moments to examine your toolbar and the pull-down menus, and experiment with a couple of changes. Most browsers have common features which make using them quite easy.
The most common browsers in use today are Netscape Communicator/Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Other browsers include Mosaic, Opera, and Lynx. Lynx is a text-only browser and
does not display graphics or multimedia.
What is a Page, a Site, and a Homepage? Your browser can be configured with its own home page. This is the page that opens when you start the browser. You can
customize this setting in your options menu to be any web page you would like. In addition to being the document the browser
uses when it starts, the home page is also just a click away by using the Home button in the browser toolbar.
What is Hypertext? In addition to web pages, help files are commonly constructed as hypertext documents. Hypermedia is a subset of hypertext. This means users can access not only text, but also graphics, sounds, movies, and animation.
What is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)? A URL is a series of words, slashes, and "dots" which make up the Internet address. Most often, you will see URLs which begin with http:// which stands for hypertext transfer protocol. The HTTP in the URL tells the server that the browser is requesting a hypertext document. The rest of the URL contains information on the server's domain, the directory to the file, and the name of the file to be displayed. Clues about where you are going and what type of file you are requesting can be gathered from the URL address. Some examples of popular URL endings include the following.
Countries also have different endings in the URL. For instance, if the URL ends in .uk you are accessing a web site on
a server in the United Kingdom.
What does the "@" sign stand for? How can I search through ALL web sites? Here are a few popular indexes that you can search.
Lycos is another web-indexing robot which includes the ability to submit the URLs of your own documents by hand, ensuring that they are available for searching. WebCrawler builds a complete site index but since it indexes the content of documents it may find links that you did not have in mind. AltaVista has an interesting approach to narrowing down your searches. Enter in the keywords to search for and after it runs your query it will provide you with your results as usual but it will also provide you with possible related keywords that you can add to your search query. This helps to narrow down your choices considerably and make them more manageable. How can I save an web image to disk? |