Introduction to the Web
The World-Wide Web was founded at the
European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), near Geneva, Switzerland.
Its center has since shifted to the World-Wide Web (or W3) Consortium
at M.I.T., where the definitive Web home page
is maintained.
The Web is basically just a collection of multimedia
hypertext documents made available by computers on the Internet running
Web servers.
As a user of the Web, all you need to access these documents
is a Web browser like Mosaic, Netscape,
or any of a number of others available.
The best way to get a feel for what this means is to poke around some
documents...
The Web on Campus
There is a
main Web server for the Trinity campus,
and several operated by various departments such as
Computer Science,
Engineering Science,and
Biology.
The Web at Other Universities
Almost every university operates a Web server now. Some typical ones
are the
University of Illinois,
UT Austin, and
Dartmouth.
A large and growing number of departments and research groups within
universities also operate their own servers, for example:
The Rest of the Web
As everyone has heard, it's growing at a phenomenal pace and every
kind of academic, commercial, and governmental organization imaginable
is beginning to make use of it. A good way to get an overview is through
one of the huge "clearing-house" servers like
Yahoo or
EINET Galaxy or
Global Network Navigator or the
World-Wide Web Virtual Library.
Using Different Browsers
Try revisiting some of the documents you've just seen using a different
browser--you'll notice that they look different. The difference won't be
too great between "similar" browsers like Mosaic and Netscape, but try
something radically different like the text-mode browser "lynx". In fact,
just try re-sizing your Mosaic or Netscape window.
The point: The notion of WYSIWYG
(what-you-see-is-what-you-get) isn't very well-defined for Web documents!
Author:
Jim McDonald
<jim@engr.trinity.edu>
Last modified: Fri May 16 09:53:34 CDT 1997