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Browsing the Web - Part 1

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 10 months ago

Browsing the Web

Weekly Tasks for April 26 - May 03, 2006

 


 

You might like to learn about Internet Connection Jargon

 

Intro

  • Let's find out together a little bit about the WWW!

 

Sources

 

 

Questions

 

 

The official definition of the World Wide Web is "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents."

 

  • wide-area: it spans the whole globe.
  • hypermedia: It contains various types of media (text, pictures, sound, movies ...) and hyperlinks that connect pages to one another.
  • information retrieval: Viewing a WWW document (commonly called a Web page) is very easy thanks to the help of Web browsers. They allow you to retrieve pages just by clicking links, or entering addresses.
  • universal access: It doesn't matter what type of computer you have, or what type of computer the page you want is stored on - your Web browser allows you to connect seamlessly to many different systems.
  • large universe of documents: Anyone can publish a Web page - and nearly anyone has! No matter what obscure information you want to find, there is bound to be someone out there who has written a Web page about it.


 

    • 2. What does URL stand for? (answer adapted from Web teacher)

 

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) gives the address of a document, not only with respect to a local computer, but with respect to the entire Internet.

URL addresses have 2 basic parts: (1) a portion specifying the method of file access (e.g. http:// or ftp://), and (2) a portion specifying the Internet location of the file to be accessed:

 

Note: the URL in the above figure is currently inoperative and shown here for illustrative purposes only.


 

3. Is there any difference between "the (Inter)net" and "the WWW"?(answer adapted from Webopedia)

 

Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (a.k.a. the Web) interchangeably, but in fact the two separate, though related things.

 

The Internet connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet. Information that travels over the Internet does so via a variety of languages known as protocols.

 

The WWW, on the other hand, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the the Web to share information. The Web also utilizes browsers to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks. Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.

 

The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet.

 

The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP.

 

So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.


 

4. Is there any difference between looking for something on the web using www.yahoo.com and using www.google.com? (answer selected from Unitec's English Online)

 

Yahoo search is a subject tree (aka Directories), i.e. a broad list of categories that branch off into sub-categories.The subject classification doesn't conform to any established system. Pages are usually only added to the directory when the writer of the page requests is, and are ranked according to their popularity (number of visitors).

 

Google, on the other hand, is a search engine. These are computer programs that 'whiz around' the Internet to find documents that contain key words which you type in. Search engines have different ways of searching which means that they will return different results and may be more or less successful for different searches. Some search only document titles and others search the entire document. Being electronic, they can't discriminate between valuable documents and ones of dubious quality.

Other search engines are: Alta Vista, Infoseek, MSN Search and Lycos.

 

Directories are usually more successful when you are searching for a site with some general information about a topic, for instance: "fairy tales", whereas search engines are more useful when looking for very specific or obscure information, for instance: "The Musicians of Bremen fairy tale".

 

(try http://searchenginewatch.com/links/article.php/2156221 for a commented list of directories and search engines)


 

5. In Microsoft Office, "Word" is a word processor, you use "Excel" for working with spreadsheets, "Powerpoint" is aka as presentation software, but ... what does "Internet Explorer" do? What other programmes can be used for the same purpose? (answer adapted from Webopedia)

 

Internet Explorer (aka IE) is Microsoft's web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages. The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Both of these are graphical browsers, which means that they can display graphics as well as text. In addition, most modern browsers can present multimedia information, including sound and video, though they require plug-ins for some formats.

Other web browsers are: Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Mozilla Sea Monkey, Thunderbird... (try http://www.winplanet.com/category/2224-1-d.htm for a more complete list)


 

CONGRATULATIONS TO: Pat Maceda, Görkem, Cecilia Moure, Horacio Idárraga Gil and Mary Hillis. They've all looked for answers to the questions before the deadline! Check your inboxes for the prize! ;-)

 

Gladys

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