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© Copyright 1997, Jim Loy
The World Wide Web is a subset of the Internet. It is made up of billions of documents like this one. And you view these documents with a Web browser like Netscape or Internet Explorer. This is much like viewing one of your own files with Word or Word Perfect.
These documents are mostly in a format called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is almost ASCII (text), but contains some extra formatting characters. The authors of these documents save them, as files, on the computers of their Internet providers, so people all over the world can read (or look at) them.
Your Web browser gives you the ability to read these HTML documents, by executing a command called HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol). You can type this command, but most of the time it is done for you. The HTTP command is of the form http:// followed by the address (URL) of the document that you want to view. If you know the document's URL, you can choose Open on your browser's window, and type the http:// command. The URL for the document that you are now reading is:
www.mcn.net/~jimloy/www.html
You may have accessed this page by typing:
http://www.mcn.net/~jimloy/www.html
Most of the time, however, you execute an http:// command by clicking on a hot spot on your computer screen:
In that case, this HTML document provided the URL (http://www.mcn.net/~jimloy/www.html), so that you did not have to type it. Clicking on the above hot spot will just take you to the top of this same document.
Your Web browser can also execute the http:// command when you choose Back or Forward or use one of your Bookmarks.
There are other commands, like mailto and ftp, for sending and receiving files.
A nice thing about the WWW is that when you rent access to the Internet, and the Web, you often get to create your own home page, and lots of sub-pages, for free. That is the case for my pages. This gives me a chance to show off in public, and get some experience as a writer.
There is a lot of garbage on the Web, just as in real life. I think that this is the price we have to pay to get a little bit of excellence.
I am trying to influence the style of the WWW, by being a good example. I don't like pages with lots of graphics and with "frames" which take forever to load. Please, warn the user about a slow page, before he/she gets there. I prefer a page that is not too dull (gray) and not too gaudy, but is just right (Momma Bear tastful). Of course my taste runs to some pretty stupid jokes, so please forgive me for that.
P.S. URL stands for Universal Resource Locator, by the way.
Addendum - Here's an actual sequence of events:
Now, I understand this whole process pretty well. But, I'm still amazed.
I heard a computer expert telling a new user that a URL is just like a phone number. The response was, "It doesn't look like a phone number." No, it is what a phone number should look like (jimloy@bozeman.mt.usa for example). In other words, it is more informative (and hopefully more natural) than a phone number. But, it really is just like a phone number.
Your web browser (Netscape or Internet Explorer) will probably let you leave off the "http://" and often "www." and maybe even the final ".com" on URL's. For example, instead of http://www.netscape.com, you can just type netscape. Your browser then tries a few combinations of things (adding "http://" at the beginning, for example), to see if they work. This simplifies your typing task.