The Internet is a world-wide network that provides electronic connection
between computers and enabling them to communicate with each other via one
of several software devices such as Electronic Mail, FTP, Telnet, Gopher,
WAIS, WWW Browsers (eg., Cello, Mosaic, Netscape, Winweb or DosLynx), etc.
The Internet is not a single network, but a collection of networks that are
connected each other. For example, Universities in the UW System are hooked
up to WiscNet, which in turn links up with other similar networks to form
the Internet.
The Gopher system is an another part of the Internet where materials are
placed on Gopher Servers and accessed via Gopher Clients. Initially, materials
made available through the Gopher System were in plain text and, therefore,
not as appealing as the World Wide Web.
A decentralized network of large number of machines that contain information
submitted by readers. The contributions are sorted out into different discussion
groups referred to as newsgroups.
The World Wide Web is that part of Internet where a network of connections
is established between computers containing hypertext/hypermedia materials.
These materials contain not only a wealth of information but also provide
links to other hypermedia materials in the WWW. These Materials are accessed
through a WWW Browser, which is essentially retrieval tool that provides
universal access to the large collection of materials made available in the
WWW and Internet. An important feature of WWW browsers is that they are able
to handle most of the other forms of internet protocols such as Gopher, WAIS,
FTP, Telnet, etc.
A Web Page is a hypermedia or hypertext page (file) that is made available
for access on some server in the World Wide Web. It may contain useful
information, materials and links to other pages in WWW.
A WWW Homepage of a server/institution/individual is a hypermedia or hypertext
file that serves as the index page for the materials provided by the
server/institution/individual. It will contain links, or a succession of
links, to all these materials. In addition, it may contain description of
the server/institution/individual and other items of interest.
A WWW Browser is a software package that establishes links to hypermedia
materials stored in host computers on the Internet, retrieves such materials
and displays them on the client computer. Different browsers are available
for different computer platforms (e.g., MS Windows, DOS, Unix, MacIntosh).
For PC's with MS Windows, browsers such as Cello, Mosaic, Netscape, Internet
Explorer, Netmanage, can be used. Doslynx runs under DOS. Many of these browsers
have versions available for other platforms such as MacIntosh and Unix.
A Uniform Resource Locator is the WWW address of an item on a WWW server.
Each item available on the WWW has a URL. It contains the name of the server,
the directory in which it is stored and the name of the document/material.
To retrieve an item one must know its URL or it must have a link (hot item)
in a document that has already been downloaded. For example, the URL of our
homepage is: http://mthwww.uwc.edu/wwwmahes/homepage.htm
CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, which defines the rules by which
a web server interacts with other software on the computer.
CGI Programs can be written to handle web forms or database searches.
HTML is the language used for creating hypertext/hypermedia documents. The
documents are created using plain-text (ASCII) characters. Some of the characters
or combinations of characters are used in HTML code for formatting or to
indicate certain operations such as links to other documents, insertion of
inline images, formatting text or enhancing the appearance of a document.
ASCII is the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
This is used as a standard for representing characters such as letters, numbers,
punctuation marks, etc. on computers. ASCII documents are extremely useful
because they can be easily transported from one computer to another. The
main drawback is that there cannot be any enhancements such as bold, italic,
underlining or other types of formatting within such documents. They are
plain-text documents.
Hypertext/Hypermedia materials are documents that may contain inline images
as well as links to multimedia features such as pictures, movies and sound.
On your computer, you will need to install appropriate software to view pictures
and movies, and to listen to sound. Note that plain-text materials also form
a subset of hypermedia materials.
VRML is the language used for creating documents that display 3-Dimensional
worlds and objects. These worlds and objects can be viewed using a VRML browser.
They can be rotated, zoomed in and out, shifted horizontally and vertically,
and inspected in small section at any location.
Java is a language that is used for writing programs for networks and the
Internet. Java programs can be written to do almost everything that regular
programs do. These programs can be included within web pages.
HTML Elements are the basic components of an HTML document. Examples of elements
are HEADINGS, PARAGRAPHS, LISTS, FONTS, TABLES, etc. HTML elements can be
used judiciously to enhance the structure and appearance of the document,
and to set up links. Elements are marked-up in the source document by using
of HTML Tags (see below) to enclose them. Elements may include attributes
that give variety to the manner in which they are to be displayed. If no
attribute is specified for an element then the default attribute for that
element will be used.
An HTML Tag is a code that is used in HTML documents to indicate elements.
An element is enclosed between and opening tag and a closing tag. The
closing tag may be omitted in the case of a few elements, such as paragraphs
or list items. A WWW browser will decode the HTML document and display it
according to the attributes specified in the tags. A starting tag is indicated
by writing the tag code within angle brackets and the corresponding closing
tag has a slash preceding the code. An example of the code for a level-two
heading is <H2> This is a level-two Heading </H2>.
A Hot Item is a word, phrase, image, an area or a region of an HTML document
that contains a link to some other document or some other location in the
same document.
For example,uwmc mthwww server Homepage is a hot
item that provides a link to the uwmc mthwww server Homepage.