When it come to
browsers, Microsoft internet explorer and Mozilla firefox are the big two.
And in terms of market share, internet
explorer dominates, but there are plenty
of other browsers floating around as well. You’d think that given the fact that
the browser market has been dominated by Microsoft or netscape almost since its
inception, there wouldn’t be a lot of other browsers out there, but that’s not
the case.
For example, opera (http://www.operasoftware,.com/) has a niche market. It’s small, fast, free,
and available for a number of platforms, including windows, Mac OS X, and
Linux. It’s also standards
compliant. Apple has developed a browser numbed safari that is the default web
browser for Mac OS X. for UNIX users who use KDE, there’s conqueror. There are
various Mozilla offshoots, such as
Camino for Mac OS X, and flock, a browser derived from firefox that is
integrated with a number of websites that enable you to publish your own
content on the web. Likewise, Commant-line browsers such as lynx and links are
available to provide an all-text view of web pages. There are also a number
browsers that provide access to the web
for people with various disabilsense; I’ll discuss them in detail in lesson 17,
“designing for the real world.” It makes sense to code to common standards to
accommodate all these types of browsers.
USING THE BROWSER TO ACCESS OTHER SERVICES
Internet veteran s know that there are dozens of different
ways to get information: FTP, Usenet news, and email. Before the web became as
popular as it is now, you had to use a different tool for each of these, all of
which used different commands. Although all these choices made for a grant
market for how to use the internet books, they weren’t very easy to use.
Web browsers changed that. Although the web itself is its
own information system with its own internet protocol *(the hypertext transfer
protocol or HTTP), web browsers can read files from other internet services
also, even better, you can create links to information on those systems just as
you would create links to web pages. This process is seamless and available
through a single application.
To point your browser to different kinds of information on
the internet, you use different kinds of information on the internet, you use
different kinds of URLs. Most URLs start
with http:, which indicates a file at an actual website, to download a file
from a public site using FTP, you’d use a URL
like ftp://-name-of-site/-directory
/ filename. You can also view the contents of a directory on a publicly
accessible FTP site using an ftp: URL
that ends with a directory name. figure 1.5 shows a listing of files
from the iBiblio FTP site at ftp://ftp.iblio.org/.
FIGURE 1.5
a list of files and directories available at the
iBiblio FTP site.
To access a use net newsgroup through your web browser
(their by launching an external news-reading program), you can simply enter a
news: URL, such as news: alt. usage. English.
You’ll learn more about different kinds of URLs in lesson5,
“adding links to your web pages.”