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Using the Web |
Contents: What is the World-Wide Web? · How to get around. · How it works (minimum technical details that you should know). · How to find things. · Evaluate what you find. · How to get more help.
The Web is a vast collection of electronic information housed on computers all over the world that are connected to the Internet. "Information" is way too bland a term to describe what you'll find on the Web. There are serious publications such as scholarly journals, government documents, and online versions of major newspapers, magazines, TV and radio broadcasters. You can use the Web for fun, to play games, listen to music, and check the local movie theater schedule. There's a Web site, or "home page", for every subject you can think of.
No one is "in charge" of the Web. Anybody with a computer and an Internet connection can browse the entire Web, and can create his or her own Web site for the rest of the world to see. Software for doing this is available for free, and it's very easy to use. No wonder there has been an explosion in the numbers of new Web sites over the past few years. The sheer magnitude of the Web can be daunting to first-time users.
Basically, you look at a Web page (like this one) with your Web browser, and wherever you see a button or a sign or a section of highlighted text, you can click on it with the mouse to go to another Web page. That's it.
To illustrate, here are some links to other Web sites that have material for beginning Web users. If you click on the colored text below, you'll see the page(s) at that site. To come back to this page, use the BACK button on your browser. It's probably up there in the top left corner.
For more information, see Navigating the World-Wide Web.
To see what's on the Web, you use a computer program called a "browser." Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera are some of the most popular browsers, but there are others, including some free ones. You tell the browser to look for a Web address that looks something like this: http://somewhere.else.com/document.html. This is called a URL, for Universal Resource Locator. The browser knows to send this request over the Internet to the computer somewhere.else.com and ask it to send back the file called document.html. The browser then reads the file that comes back and interprets the contents to display on your screen. The contents can be text, images, video, animations, audio, or any combination thereof. The computer that sends back the file is called a "server."
The file that the browser displays is written in HTML (HyperText Markup Language). This is not a computer language like C or Fortran; it's plain English words that tell the browser how to format the information on the screen. You can use any text editor to read or write an HTML file. To see what the file actually looks like, you can use the View Source function of the browser. (Try it on this Web page.) "Hypertext" means that a Web page can contain a reference to another Web page. On your screen, the reference may look like highlighted text, or it may be a picture of a button or bullet or some other graphic. When you use your mouse to click on it, your browser then displays the page referred to. And that page, of course, can contain references, or links, to other pages, and so on. Links can go anywhere -- to another page on the same computer, another computer halfway around the world, or even to another paragraph further down in the same page. Don't expect a hierarchy of neatly organized information; there's a reason why it's called the Web.
Some ambitious people have attempted the gargantuan task of organizing a directory of Web sites. Some popular ones are:
Try these first; they will lead you to others. You can browse through the categories and subcategories just to see what's there, or you can enter a word (or phrase) and have a search engine find sites that contain that word.
When you have found a Web page you like, use the Add Bookmark function in your browser (called Add To Favorites in the Internet Explorer browser). This adds the page's address to your list of bookmarks, so you can just click to go back there.
After you tool around the Web for awhile, you may observe a couple of basic properties of Web sites:
Anybody can post a Web page. Anybody from megabucks companies to your average third-grader. (You can too; see below.) All those caveats you've heard about printed material apply tenfold to the Web: Don't believe everything you read. Consider the source. Just because it's in print (or on a nicely-decorated Web page) doesn't mean it's true. Because it is so easy to create a Web site, everybody who has something to say will say it on the Web; just be aware of this when you're surfing. Also, realize that a Web page can be dazzling with graphics and animation and clever text, but still be void of substance, while the plain-looking pages often have the most content.
"Are we there yet?" Another thing you may have observed is that a large number of Web sites are just lists of links to other Web sites. This can be really annoying when you're looking for something specific; you follow link after link and you never seem to get to the actual thing -- article, image, whatever. One way to avoid this is to use a search engine, like the ones on Yahoo, Google, etc. Read the hints on how to refine your search to get exactly what you want. You'll still end up with some "lists of lists", but you'll weed them out faster.
The best place to get help is on the Web itself. Start with the Beginner's Guides listed above, or use a search engine to find others.
The Arts and Sciences Computing Center has instructions for students who want to create their own home pages.
Once you've created your home page, you'll want to make it look nice. Again, try the Web for help, via Yahoo etc. There are plenty of sites that offer free graphics, background images, buttons, rulers, etc. for you to copy. Any time you see a page you like, you can look at the underlying HTML to see how it was done. Use the View Source function in your browser. You can also save the page to a file in HTML format, so that you can edit it and extract the parts you like to use on your own page. But keep reading...
Respect intellectual property. In the early days of the Web, using other people's pages as a basis for designing your own page was an accepted and encouraged way of learning about the Web. Now that companies and individuals invest serious time and money in Web page design, folks are often very sensitive about it. Some people consider even the design of a button or a horizontal line to be intellectual property, and they don't want you to copy theirs. So use courtesy and common sense, and give credit where it's due. Washington University's Computer Use Policy says that "Users should generally assume that material [on the Internet] is copyrighted unless they know otherwise and not copy or disseminate copyrighted material without permission."