INTRODUCTION

The World Wide Web, or web for short, is a hypermedia-based Internet navigational system. Documents on the web contain links to other points in the document, to other documents, or even to other resources on the Internet. This allows one to access information in a nonlinear or nonsequential manner. Thus, users don't have to access information in a traditional beginning-to-end fashion as in a book, but rather they can jump directly to a new location. Special software called a web browser interprets these documents and presents them in a user-friendly manner. The text-based web browser most people use for the World Wide Web is Lynx and is executed from the SGI host computer itself. The graphics-based web browser most people use is called Netscape Navigator and is executed from the desktop computer. Although Netscape Navigator is available free of charge from the University Computer Centre at the Student Consultant desk in the Student Computer Lab, you must provide the diskette.

UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATOR (URL) ADDRESSES

Web documents use a special type of address to access other documents or resources on the Internet called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL for short. A typical URL address has the form service://host/path, where service is the type of service used to access the document or resource, host is the host computer's Internet address, and path details the path on the host computer where the document or resource can be found. For web documents, the service is http (hypertext transfer protocol). For example, the University of Windsor's home page has a URL address of http://www.uwindsor.ca. Other common resource services are gopher (a menu-based Internet navigational system) and ftp (file transfer protocol to transfer files on the Internet).