OTHER BROWSERS

 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.”