In This Issue
The World Wide Web: Pg 1
Bus-Tech's Datablaster: Pg 3-4
Kent's Korner: Pg 4
The World Wide Web
With the incredible amount of information available on the Internet
nowadays, being able to navigate on the World Wide Web (WWW) is a must for
any network guru. Officially described as a "wide-area hypermedia
information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large
universe of documents", the WWW is quickly becoming the most widely used
Internet resource. People browsing the WWW are able to retrieve text, images,
sound, movies and other media, usually by means of a graphical point-and-
click interface.
History of the WWW
The WWW was created in March 1989 by CERN, the European Laboratory of
Particle Physics. The project was headed by Tim Berners-Lee with the
intent of transporting ideas and research throughout the organization.
By the end of 1990, the first piece of Web software was introduced, and
throughout 1992 other developersjoined in to create the basic framework
of todays WWW. Since then hundreds of people throughout the world have
spent time writing Web software and advertising the capabilities of the
WWW. At the end of November 1994, the were about 700,000 home pages on
the Web, including business, government, educational and personal
users. At the end of February 1995, the number had nearly tripled to 2
million.
How does the Web Work?
The operation of the Web relies mainly on hypertext and hypermedia as its way
of interacting with users. Hypertext is what sets apart the Web from other
Internet resources. It allows you to link your document to other related
documents all over the world. If you locate some information that you need,
you will be able to follow links which lead to other sources of similar
information. Hypermedia is hypertext with a difference, since hypermedia
documents contain links not only to other text documents, but also to other
forms of media. Even images are able to link to other documents. Web
software is designed around a client-server type architecture. The language
the WWW uses for creating and recognizing hypermedia documents is
the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). HTML is a very easy to use,
and easy to understand language. HTML documents are simply a
standard 7-bit ASCII file with codes that contain information about the
layout and hyperlinks associated with the page. Programs exist that convert
existing data, such as a document written in TeX, into an HTML
document. Additionally, the HTML language is still being expanded, now
in version 3.0.
Browsing the WWW
Navigating through the WWW is done by means of a client software package
known as a browser. WWW browsers interpret documents written in HTML
and layout the text, graphics, and
See WWW on page 2.
