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Imagine a combination of books, movies, magazine articles, forms, library catalogs, and software programs scattered around the world, but accessible from your computer. This is the web. Basically, the web is a vast amorphous blob of text, graphics, sounds, animation and video data scattered across networks and computers worldwide.
To access and view the information available on web servers, you use a program called a web browser. Common browsers include Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer.
If you do not already have Netscape or Internet Explorer installed on your computer, you can download it from Haverford's Software Download page. Detailed download instructions are available from there.
Every web page has a unique URL or Uniform Resource Locator. A URL is the address or location information of a web site/page. In Netscape, you can type in a URL to get a specific site or document that you want to view. Or, you can follow hypertext links to get to the same item.
Let's look at a sample URL: http://www.haverford.edu/acc/help/helpdesk.html
Figure 1
1. The first component in Figure 1 , the protocol, identifies a method for interpreting computer information. Many Internet pages use HTTP (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol). Other protocols you might come across include HTTPS (for a secure site, such as your bank), FTP (short for File Transfer Protocol), and FILE (for files on your local hard drive or local network). In the sample above, http: is the protocol.
2. The 2nd constituent of the URL in Figure 1. is the computer host or web server. Each server on the Internet has a unique address name which often includes the name of the organization maintaining the server. In the sample above, www.haverford.edu is the server.
3. The third component in Figure 1, the pathname, identifies the location of an item on the server. For example, a pathname usually specifies the name of the file comprising the page (such as helpdesk.html), possibly preceded by one or more directory names (folder names) that contain the file separated by slashes. In the sample above, acc/help/helpdesk.html is the pathname.
The web provides hypertext links to anywhere else on the web. Hypertext allows the reader to navigate flexibly through linked pieces of information. Hypertext documents or Web pages contain links to other home pages and/or other text, sound, video and image files.
A link is a connection from one page to another location. You find a link by looking for one or more words highlighted with color, underlining, or both in the content area of a page. Images and icons with colored borders also serve as links.
You can bring a linked page to your screen by single clicking on the highlighted text, image, or icon. Clicking on a link transfers page content from the specified server to your computer. After you click on a link, the Netscape status indicator animates to show you that the transfer of the page to your computer is in progress. You can stop a transfer by depressing the stop button in the top right of your Netscape window. Notice that after clicking on a link, the location or URL changes in the Location field on your browser's tool bar.
An unvisited link is a connection to a page that you have not yet viewed; a visited link is one you have. By default, unvisited links are underlined and blue while visited links are underlined and purple (but the author of the page can choose his or her own link styles and colors).
For instance, you might see:
Click here for more information about William Shakespeare.
If you clicked on the word "here", you would get another page of information about Shakespeare.
You might also see the same kind of thing in this form:
The author of Romeo and Juliet was William Shakespeare, a very famous sixteenth-century playwright.
This sentence doesn't explicitly tell you that you can get more information about Shakespeare by clicking, but because William Shakespeare is highlighted you know that you can click there. (What you get after you click depends entirely on what the person who set up the information put there. It could be a picture, a bibliography, an essay, or almost anything else.)
What are Search Engines?
If you know the URL of the web page that you would like to browse, go to the File menu, select Open page... and enter the URL into the dialog box provided. Many times, however, you will not have the URL of the page that you would like to see or you may not even know where to look. Surfing the web can sometimes be profitable but it can be quite frustrating. Search Engines can help you navigate the web. These tools can also locate material stored on the Internet based upon searches of key words or subject areas.
Some popular Search Engines include Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, Infoseek, and Excite.
Haverford's Magill Library has a web page which describes and links several of these sites.
There are many ways to navigate through pages on the web. In addition to links on the web pages you're viewing, you can access previously viewed links using your browsers buttons and menu items. The exact menu items available vary depending upon what browser you are using and how you have configured it. However, a few common helpful buttons are:
You can customize your browsers with your personal preferences for your home page, fonts, security options, etc. See you browser's help menu for details.
For Questions and Comments, contact Haverford
College's Academic Computing Center.
Last updated on
March 8, 2005
