NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB

NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and here you are at the beginning of a journey that will show you how to write, design, and publish pages on the world wide web.

IN THIS LESSON

Before beginning the actual journey, you should start simple, with the basics. You’ll learn the following:

§  How the world wide web really works

§  What web browsers do, and a couple of popular ones from which to choose

§  What a web server is, and why you need one

§  Some information about uniform resource locators (URLs) These days the web is pervasive, and may be most if not all of today’s information will seem like old news.  If so, feel free to skim it and skip ahead to lesson 2, “preparing to points to think about when you design and organize your own web documents.

HOW THE WORLD WIDE WEB WORKS

Chances are that you’ve used the web, perhaps even a lot. However, you might not have done a lot of thinking about how it works under the covers.  In this first section, I’m going to describe the web at a more theoretical level so that  you can understand how it works as a platform.

I have a friend who likes to describe things many meaningful words strung together in a chain so that it takes several minutes to sort out what he’s  just said.

If  were he, I’d describe the world wide web as a global, interactive, dynamic, cross-platform, distributed, graphical hypertext information system that runs over the internet, whew! Unless you understand all these words and how they fit together, this description isn’t going to make much sense. (My friend often doesn’t make much sense, either.)

So, let’s  look at all these words and see what they mean in the context of how you use the web as a publishing medium.

THE WEB IS A HYPERTEXT INFORMATION SYSTEM

The idea behind  hypertext is that instead of reading text in a rigid, linear structure (such as a book), you can skip easily from one point to another. You can get more information, go back, jump to other topics, and navigate through the text based  on what interests you at the time.

Hypertext enables you to read and navigate text and visual information in a nonlinear way, based on what you want to know next.

When you  hear  the  term hypertext, think links.   (in fact, some  people still refer to links as hyperlinks.) whenever you visit a web page, you’re almost certain to see  links through-out the page. Some of the links might point to locations within that same page, others to pages on the same site, and still others might point to content stores on other servers. Hypertext was an old concept when the web was invented-it was found in applications such as hyper card and various help systems.  However, the world wide web redefined how large a hypertext system could be. Even large websites were hypertext systems of a scale not before seen, and when you take into account that it’s  no more difficult to link to a document on a server in Australia from a server in the united states than it is to link to a document on a server in the united states than it is to link to a document stored in the same directory, the scope of the web becomes truly staggering. 

NOTE

Nearly all large corporations and medium-sized businesses and organizations are using web technology to manage projects, order materials, and distributed  company information in a paperless environment. By locating their documents on a private, secure web server called an intranet, they take advantage of the technologies the world wide web has to offer while keeping the information contained within the company.