CHAPTER 6: The World Wide Web


Quite simply, the World Wide Web is the Internet's world spanning collection of HTTP servers. It is called a web because of the interconnected way in which the many servers reference each other with HyperText links in HTML documents.

CERN and the Web Initiative

The World Wide Web, or WWW, started as a project to allow high energy physicists to better communicate and share information. In 1989 it found its beginnings as a project proposal at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics located in Geneva, Switzerland. It has since grown to be the default infrastructure for hypertext and multimedia communication on the global Internet.

The World Wide Web Initiative is now a joint effort between CERN and The Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Together, these organizations work to define the software, protocols, and conventions used to communicate on the Web. The World Wide Web uses the Internet as its communication backbone. It is comprised of many different servers at many different organizations throughout the world. Almost anyone can become part of the World Wide Web. You only need a connection to the Internet and a computer capable of running some version of web server software (such as GLACI-HTTPD). When you create HTML documents on your Web server, you can include hyperlinks to any other server or document on the World Wide Web. Likewise, other documents on the Web can be set up with hyperlinks to your web server.

People are finding an incredible number of uses for the World Wide Web, everything from placing scientific journals online to creating virtual storefronts with online product catalogs.

NCSA Mosaic

The most exciting thing about the World Wide Web is the way it makes information on the Internet easier to locate, browse, and retrieve. The software that actually allows you to retrieve and view documents on a web server is called a web client. The first such widely used client was NCSA Mosaic. Mosaic, by providing a point and click interface, became the first truly user friendly, cross platform interface for browsing the Internet. It has been dubbed the Internet's First Killer Application and has spawned a revolution in how the Internet is used and perceived. The fact that NCSA is providing Mosaic for free adds to its popularity.

NCSA stands for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. It is located at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champlaign. Their mosaic web browser exists for three different computer platforms: UNIX, MS-Windos, and Macintosh. It can be downloaded via anonymous FTP from the server ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu. You might also wish to out the NCSA Mosaic Home Page at the following URL:

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html

Netscape Navigator

Mosaic has now been surpassed in popularity by Netscape Navigator, a widely used commercial web browser. To learn more about Netscape, connect to the Netscape Home Page.