What is WorldWideWeb all about
The World
Wide Web (or WWW or W3) is a client/server architecture
that allows hypertext access to the wide variety of documents
(text, images, movies, sound, ...) on the Internet.
WWW is based on three base concepts:
- Any document accessible to the WWW client can be uniquely addressed by its
Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
The URL contains access protocol, host name and path information
of the document.
- A HyperText
Markup Language (HTML) is the WWW's native language
for writing hypertext documents. A good source of information on HTML
are the HTML Writers Guild's
HTML Resources
(references, validation, style, test pages, ...).
See also NCSA's
HTML-Primer.
Netscape has added some
nonstandard
HTML extensions. See a nice collection of HTML document
building tools.
Several HTML checkers
are available on-line or as installable programs.
- WWW introduces a new protocol called HTTP,
but recognizes many of the existing protocols for accessing documents, like:
GOPHER, WAIS, FTP, NNTP and TELNET.
Some of the documentation is also available in
PostScript or plain text formats.
Several clients (readers/browsers) are publicly available:
- Lynx
is a WWW client from the University of Kansas
and is targeted for the use over character terminals (e.g. VT100).
Runs on many platforms under Unix, OpenVMS and MS DOS.
- Mosaic
is a WWW client with a friendly window-based user interface,
developed at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
It runs on most of the popular platforms under Unix
(X/Motif),
OpenVMS (DECwindows/Motif),
MS-Windows
and on
Macintosh.
- Netscape Navigator
(Unix/X-windows, MS-Windows) from Mosaic Communications Corporation.
Downloads and displays images incrementally while you read pages,
which also display incrementally, making it the best browser
at the time of this writing. Netscape is a commercial product
but the current version is free for personal use by individuals.
- Arena
-- a Cern pre-release viewer for HTML 3. Runs on Unix platforms.
- and others
Whichever client you are using, online help should be available.
Additionally, the client may provide a history list to show you
which documents you have read, give you the option of marking a
document for easy reference later, and allow some degree of
customization by the end-user.
Embedded in documents are 'links'.
A link is selectable text that can be used to
access more information about the text.
If you "activate" a link, by clicking on the selectable text,
or by pressing the return key while the text is selected
(or whatever method your particular client software supports),
new information will appear on the screen in place of the previous screen.
See the list
of available servers and
Running
A World-Wide Web Service.
How to Offer Documents to WWW on Node cathy.ijs.muzej.si
If you do not have HTTP server running on your workstation,
and have an account on cathy.ijs.muzej.si, please read the
short guide on how to offer
documents to the WWW on node CATHY (in Slovene language).
To learn more about the distributed information systems development,
new software, information providers and to get help on less-than-clear
issues, check the Usenet groups on your NNTP server in the
hierarchy comp.infosystems.*
parts of this text taken from Cern and UKans documents
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