World Wide Web FAQs

Q:   What is the World Wide Wide?
A:   WWW stands for "World Wide Web." The WWW project, started by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), seeks to build a "distributed hypermedia system." In practice, the web is a vast collection of interconnected documents, spanning the world. Tim Berners-Lee continues his pioneering work with the W3 Consortium at MIT.

The advantage of hypertext is that in a hypertext document, if you want more information about a particular subject mentioned, you can usually "just click on it" to read further detail. In fact, documents can be and often are linked to other documents by completely different authors -- much like footnoting, but you can get the referenced document instantly!

To access the web, you run a browser program. The browser reads documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers set up hypermedia servers which browsers can get documents from.

The browsers can, in addition, access files by FTP, NNTP (the Internet news protocol), gopher and an ever-increasing range of other methods. On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of documents and databases.

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents. Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.

Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations.


Q:   What is a URL?
A:   URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator". It is a draft standard for specifying an object on the Internet, such as a file or newsgroup.

URLs look like this: (file: and ftp: URLs are synonymous.)

The first part of the URL, before the colon, specifies the access method. The part of the URL after the colon is interpreted specific to the access method. In general, two slashes after the colon indicate a machine name (machine:port is also valid).

When you are told to "check out this URL", what to do next depends on your browser; please check the help for your particular browser. For the line-mode browser at CERN, which you will quite possibly use first via telnet, the command to try a URL is "GO URL" (substitute the actual URL of course). In Lynx you just select the "GO" link on the first page you see; in graphical browsers, there's usually an "Open URL" option in the menus.


Q:   How do I set up my own web page and how much space can I use?
A:   Check out NetSys's Create your own Web Page link and learn! Through NetSys, most everyone has 3 megs of space (businesses are an exception).


Q:   How do I find out what is new on the WWW?
A:   The following are some links to places that keep abreast the latest and greatest information on the WWW:

What's New With NCSA Mosaic
The unofficial newspaper of the World Wide Web is What's New With NCSA Mosaic (URL is http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.html ), which carries announcements of new servers on the web and also of new web-related tools. This should be in your hot list if you're not using Mosaic (which can access it directly through the help menu).
comp.internet.net-happinings
You can also check out the newsgroup comp.internet.net-happenings, which carries WWW announcements and many other Internet-related announcements.



Q:   How can I find information relating to a specific topic using the Web?
A:   The best place to start is to use an Internet search engine. You may use NetSys's search the WWW form to assist you, or you can link directly.

Alta Vista
(URL is http://www.altavista.digital.com ) is probably the most powerful web searching facility at this time, with an exhaustive database and the capability to search USENET newsgroups as well as web sites. The query language is also powerful.
Yahoo
(URL is http://www.yahoo.com/ ) is probably the most complete hierarchical, topical index of web sites, and also features a sophisticated search facility.
Lycos
(URL is http://fuzine.mt.cs.cmu.edu/mlm/lycos-home.html ) is another web-indexing robot, which includes the ability to submit the URLs of your own documents by hand, ensuring that they are available for searching.
WebCrawler
(URL is http://webcrawler.com.html ) builds an impressively complete index; on the other hand, since it indexes the content of documents, it may find many links that aren't exactly what you had in mind. However, it does a good job of sorting the documents it finds according to how closely they match your search.
World Wide Web Worm
(URL is http://www.cs.colorado.edu/home/mcbryan/WWWW.html ) builds its index based on page titles and URL contents only. This is somewhat less inclusive, but pages it finds are more likely to be an exact match with your needs.
InfoSeek
(URL is http://www.infoseek.com/ ) is a commercial search service which also offers a free web search facility (http://www2.infoseek.com). You can specify phrases to locate, among other query operations, and InfoSeek's commercial service can search more than just web pages (newsgroups, for instance).

InfoSeek's commercial service charges 10 cents per query and offers a free trial to new users. (Increasing load on the free search servers makes this sound better every day.)

OpenText
(URL is http://www.opentext.com ) also offers a robust web searching facility.



Q:   What different programs are available for me to use WWW?
A:   There are several different programs available for browsing the web. A few are:


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