• How does the Web work?
• What's the difference between the Web and the Internet?
• What is an Intranet?
• What are HTML documents?
• What is a web browser?
• What is a page, a site, and a homepage?
• What is hypertext?
• What is a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)?
• What does the "@" sign stand for?
• How can I search through ALL web sites?
• How can I save an web image?

How does the Web work?
The World Wide Web, one of many facets of the Internet, is a network of information stored in computers all over the world. Developed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee as a project to distribute hypermedia, the Web has expanded at a phenomenal rate and is growing larger every day.

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 Internet, which evolved from a Defense Department project in the late 1960s, is a system of linked computer networks, international in scope, that facilitate data communication services such as remote login, file transfer, electronic mail, newsgroups, and the World Wide Web. All of these computers are considered part of the Internet because they speak a common tongue or protocol. TCP/IP is the protocol that makes it possible for your desktop PC to effortlessly parley with a supercomputer on the other side of the world.

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?
An Intranet is essentially a miniature version of the Internet for use by a particular company or organization. They are private computer networks that use the same protocols and software used on the public Web except that they are only for use by a particular group. Intranets are often used to disseminate company information, share documents, and promote communication and collaboration between employees.

Intranets also allow companies to set up technologies that broadcast messages to their employees such as company news or announcements.

What are HTML Documents?
HTML or HyperText Markup Language files are the main file format used for Web pages. These documents are text files that can be created using any text editor (e.g., Emacs or vi on UNIX systems; Simpletext on Macintosh; Notepad on Windows machines). You can also use word processing software (e.g., WordPerfect, Word) as long as you remember to save your document as "text only with line breaks." These files include tags which a web browser uses to display the web page.

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?
A web browser is the software that allows a user to view and interact with web pages. Browsers support hypertext markup language (HTML) and other hypermedia features, and translate these raw files into the pages you view. Some browsers support features others may not which is why some sites recommend a particular 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.

• BACK allows you to go back to the page you viewed previously.
• HOME returns you to the page you have set as your home (the page you have set to open with your browser).
• STOP allows you stop a page from loading, a convenient function to use when a file is taking too long to load and you no longer wish to wait.
• PRINT provides you with a hard copy of information from a printer connected to your computer.
• GO tracks your session history and is another way to jump forward or back to a previously viewed page.
• BOOKMARKS or FAVORITES allow you to save the locations of pages you would like to go back to later.

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?
Documents on the World Wide Web are called web pages. Pages that originate from one source and link together comprise a web site. A homepage is one page, usually the beginning page of any Web site. It is usually the starting point to get to the rest of the site.

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?
The language that makes the Web work is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). The essence of hypertext documents are links. A link is a portion of the text that connects or points to another file (or position within a file). Typically, links are indicated by different colored text and/or underlining. Graphical images can also be links. When your pointer runs over a link it becomes a hand so you know it is a link; simply click once on the linked text or graphic and you will move forward to the linked document.

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 Uniform Resource Locator or URL is the "address" of a web page. The browser uses Internet addresses to locate the files needed to display the Web page on your computer. Every web page on every server in the world has its own unique URL. A web page may have more than one URL but a URL can only reference a single web page.

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.

• .com for commercial and company sites
• .edu for educational sites (such as a university)
• .org for non-profit organizations
• .gov for government agencies
• .net for networks

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?
Alternately known as the at sign or at, @'s are used to separate the domain name (also known as the host name) from the user name in an Internet e-mail address. For example, in "webmaster@ihs.gov", the @ sign stands between the person who receives the message, "webmaster", and the name of the computer where the account resides, "ihs.gov". Essentially the @ sign tells the computers that handle e-mail where your name stops and your provider's name starts.

How can I search through ALL web sites?
A search engine acts like a library card catalog for the Internet. When a user enters in specific keywords, the search engine will search its database to provide matches. Search engines gather their database information in different ways and also perform the user's search in different ways. Therefore, you will get different results in each search engine with the same keywords. Try using the same text in a few different search engines and see what happens.

Here are a few popular indexes that you can search.

Yahoo is probably the most popular search site on the Web. It is one of the most complete, hierarchical, and topical indexes of web sites, and also features a sophisticated search facility.

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?
If you are using Netscape, Mosaic 3.0, or Internet Explorer, click on the right mouse button (or hold down the single mouse button for more than a second if you are using the Mac version) over the image. A menu will appear that includes the option of saving the image, or picture. In the save window, select the area where you would like the file saved and then click "save."