In 1990 Tim Berens-Lee invented a protocol based on TCP/IP that could work with it on the Internet and was more flexible. Soon after this, the NCSA (National Centre for Supercomputing Applications) developed Mosaic, a graphical interface for this protocol called the World Wide Web (WWW).
To view Web pages (the electronic documents with pictures and formatted text that you view on the Web) you need to have a Web browser. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. You can use either one or any other Web browser. If you are not sure what you have, then you will still have Internet Explorer, it comes with Windows.
To do anything online (on the Internet), you must first connect to the Internet. If you don’t know how, see Appendix B. After you have connected to the Internet, open your Web browser. Every computer connected to the Internet has an address, called an IP address to identify it. This is a number like ‘207.194.50.216’. To have to remember something like that to access a web page would be a pain, so Domain Names were created. Domain names are names that you can type in the location bar (more on this below) in your browser. The name is then sent to a server on the Internet called a DNS (Domain Name Service) server that then returns the correct IP address.
You should be connected to the Internet and have your browser open. (You may not have access to the Internet where you live. Your teacher will provide a substitute.) First we should identify the parts of a browser so that we know what we’re talking about. Figure 6.1 is a picture of Internet Explorer. If your browser looks a little different, that is okay.
The location bar can also be called the address bar, and it is where you type the URL (Universal Resource Locator or Uniform Resource Locator), which is laid out as follows:
http:// home.golden.net /~psweber/ The domain
The protocol name The folder and/or file name on the server name
After you type the URL press the Enter key and you web browser will take you to the page. The first button on the toolbar is the ‘Back’ button. It does the same thing as the ‘< Back’ button that we saw before, it goes to the previous screen you were looking at. In this case, the previous web page you were at. The back arrow on the button is a universal icon. Universal icons are ones that are always used to represent the same function. This is different from a program icon like on your desktop or from an icon that only occurs in one program. Even the ‘< Back’ button has a back arrow, that’s what the ‘<’ is for. Note that universal icons do not always look exactly the same (i.e. the arrow can look different, as long as it points left).