World Wide Web in General: Basic Knowledge to learn Internet

The Web has become the premier feature of the Internet. It offers vast amounts of information in easily accessible text and graphics format. For this reason, it is appealing to almost any user, regardless of purpose. The Web is viewed through a browser. As noted, a browser is software that allows the user to gain access to the Web. Information on the Web is organized in collections of pages. Each page has its own unique address—its URL (uniform resource locator). In order to access an item of information, its location must be known. The addressing system for the Web is similar to a street address. Each address has a URL. The URL tells the computer what type of protocol is being used, where the site is located, and what type of site it is.

For example, the address http://www.whitehouse.gov brings the user to the Web site for the White House. A Web address is made up of several parts. The first part tells the computer what type of protocol to use to access the site. It is similar to a long-distance access code for the telephone. Many Web site addresses, such as the one for the White House, begin with http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).The www, of course, stands for World Wide Web. The name of the site is whitehouse. The suffix .gov is the domain name for a government site.

The Web has thousands of sites that consist of a home page and additional pages in which the text may contain embedded hyperlinks to other sites. A hyperlink (or just plain link) is easily distinguishable from other text on the page because it appears in a different color and format, such as blue, underlined text. When a user points to a link and clicks on it with a mouse, the computer is instructed to go to the address embedded within that link and retrieve the document that is housed there. This new page of information may in itself have more links to other pages, so one can easily navigate—browse—from page to page by clicking on links. This activity, as even most newbie know, is commonly called surfing the Web or surfing the Net.

Source: The Nonprofits’ Guide to Internet Communications Law. Bruce C. Hopkins. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Inc