Chapters 1 : Internet and the World Wide Web
To view documents on the Internet, you need a piece of
software called a browser. A browser provides you an interface
to interact with the Internet. Browsers are also called clients.
Any software that allows you to browse the Web is called a Web
client. The most commonly used Web clients are Mosaic, Netscape,
and Internet Explorer.
Mosaic was the first Graphical Web browser software that was
made available on UNIX platforms. Since then Mosaic has been
extended to Macintosh and Windows. Capabilities of Mosaic
have set the standards for other browsers.
Web browsers include the capability to display HyperText and
Hypermedia documents such as sounds and movies. Another
feature useful is its ability to display electronic text in
a variety of fonts, including normal text, bold, and italic.
Web browsers provide the capabilities to have forms that the
user is able to fill-out. This forms are a specially designed
section of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) documents. The
forms allow user feedback, product ordering, and document searching.
Browsers have the ability to view Postscript files online in
real time mode. With Postscript files, you can display
scientific notation.
In addition to the already mention features, browsers make
transparent Uniform Resource Locator (URL) redirection.
The URL provides the addresses of documents stored in
different locations.
Finally, browsers have the ability to authenticate the
identity of users by user names and passwords. Once a user is
authenticated on a server, the browser reuses the information
without prompting for it again.
Another Web browser is Netscape Navigator. Netscape provides
the ability to support inline images. Meaning the images
can become apart of the web page and are coded into the HTML
pages using the HTML language. Netscape also has built-in
components for sending and receiving E-mail. Another built-in
component is security features that provide the necessary security
for various tasks the browser does.
Caching is used by Netscape as a temporary storage of files
for quick response time. Caching allows files to be accessed
on your hard drive instead of access the site it came from again.
Access to links while the documents are being retrieved.
Therefore all the links and images are live as they are downloaded.
This allows web pages to be viewed as they are downloaded.
Plus if while downloading one document, you click on a link
on that document, the download will stop and the retrieval of the
next document is begun. Despite different versions of Netscape
on different platforms, the interfaces stay consistent.
Lynx is another Web browser, however, the slight difference is
it is text based. It can connect users with information in the
various methods as mentioned earlier. This feature allows it to
be quicker, since it does not have to load in-line graphics.
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