An instructional website on Internet literacy for teachers

The World Wide Web What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web? Think of the Net as primarily hardware and software, you know, technical stuff -- and the Web as wholly content and information, as in creative and intellectual in nature. The Net consists of cables, computers, satellites, and networks. Computers are able to communicate using different software and protocols with each other, connected either by cable or wireless technology. The Web, on the other hand, is an abstract concept that exists in cyberspace. When we speak of the Web we talk of text, sound, graphics, and videos that are presented in Web page formats. To navigate, surf, or browse around the Web is to move from one site to another, from one page to another, one file to another using the hypertext links.  Who invented it? The father of the World Wide Web is Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. In 1989 he developed a network protocol called Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a way for physicists to send documents over the internet to share research information. He is also credited as the man who coined the words "World Wide Web" and defined standards such as the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) and Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML).  What is a Web page? It is a document written in HTML code that contains text and links to other pages, files, or parts of the document. The earliest Web pages were all-text documents and at present there are still text-based browsers like Lynx. Although Tim Berners-Lee also wrote the first multimedia browser in 1990, graphical user-interface (GUI) browsers didn't become popular until Mosaic came along in 1993.  What are browsers? Browsers are viewer programs that display Web pages. There are also browsers to view e-mail , newsgroup discussions, etc. The most popular GUI browsers today are Netscape and Internet Explorer. Marc Anderssen, the founder of Netscape, is also the brains of Mosaic. Web browsers interpret HTML codes how to display text, graphics, links, and multimedia files in a page. When your computer loads a web page, that is, an HTML file, you don't see these codes unless you give the "View at Page Source" command. To see what the HTML code for this page looks like press CtrlandUat the same time, or click on the word View in the toolbar above you, and select Page Source. Not all files on the Web can be displayed by a browser. There are, for example, applications that perform specific tasks when you click on the appropriate link, like e-mail. With their "point-and-click" features, GUI browsers dramatically made the Internet user-friendly to novice users and its popularity exploded when people were able to dial-in using a home computer and modem to an Internet Service Provider. Before this only large institutions like universities, corporations, and government organizations that could afford to install cables have access to the Internet. These two innovations opened up the Internet to a critical mass of individual users, people who don't have the time or inclination to learn technical stuff, and people who use computers at home for work and personal activities.  Next to the e-mail, the Web is the most popular service on the Internet. According to the  Online Computer Literacy Center, as of June 28, 1999, there are 4.8 million Web sites all over the world, a 71 percent increase from 1998. Websites, Homepages, and URL A website is a collection of pages in the Web. Home page, as the name suggests, is the main or opening page of a website. You will notice that several websites use the word "Home" or an image of a house to guide surfers back to the main page. The URL or Unform Resource Locator is the specific address of a webpage, like http://oocities.com/toe6000/www1.html for this particular page. If you look up at your Location Toolbar above you will see this address displayed. Sometimes, the URL of another website is all you need to go to that site. Try this, click and delete the URL of this page and in its place, type http://cnn.com which is the URL for the home page of "CNN Interactive," and hit Enter. You can always click on the Back button to return to this page.  URLs are also used in newsgroups, FTP, and telnet to access other addresses and files.
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