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This is an introduction to the World-Wide Web project, describing the
concepts, software and access methods. It is aimed at people who know
a little about navigating the Internet, but want to know more about
WWW specifically.
This informational document is posted to news.answers,
comp.infosystems.gopher, comp.infosystems.wais and alt.hypertext on
the 1st and 15th of every month (please allow a day or two for it to
propagate to your site). The latest version is always available on
the web as http://www.vuw.ac.nz:80/overseas/www-faq.html (see the
section titled "What is a URL?" to understand what this means).
What is WWW and hypertext?
The most recently posted version of this document is kept on the
news.answers archive on rtfm.mit.edu in
/pub/usenet/news.answers/www-faq (the URL for this is
ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/www-faq). For
information on FTP, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu
with
send usenet/news.answers/finding-sources in
the body, instead of asking me.
Nathan
Torkington maintains this document. Feedback about it is to be
sent via e-mail to Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz
In all cases, regard this document as out of date. Definitive
information should be on the web, and static versions such as this
should be considered unreliable at best.
WWW stands for the "World Wide Web". The WWW project, started and
driven by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), seeks
to build a distributed hypermedia system.
Built on the Internet, the approach is simple: to access the web, you
run a browser program. The browser reads documents, and can fetch
documents from other sources. Information providers set up hypermedia
servers which browsers can get documents from.
The browsers can, in addition, access files by FTP, NNTP (the Internet
news protocol), gopher and an ever-increasing range of other methods.
On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers
will permit searches of documents and databases.
The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents.
Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you
deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- you clicking on a part
of the text, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.
Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with
pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a
text file, but might display images or sound or animations.
The first part of the URL, before the colon, specifies the access
method. The part of the URL after the colon is interpreted specific
to the access method. In general, two slashes after the colon
indicate a machine name (machine:port is also valid).
You have two options -- either use a browser that can be telnetted to,
or use a browser on your machine.
Browsers accessable by telnet
An up-to-date list of these is available on the Web as
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Bootstrap.html and should be
regarded as an authoritative list.
info.cern.ch
No password is required. This is in
Switzerland, so continental US users might be better off using a
closer browser.
ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
A full screen browser "Lynx" which requires a vt100 terminal.
Log in as www.
eies2.njit.edu
(or telnet 128.235.1.43) Log in as www. A full-screen browser
in New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA.
vms.huji.ac.il
(IP address 128.139.4.3). A dual-language Hebrew/English
database, with links to the rest of the world. The line mode
browser, plus extra features. Log in as www. Hebrew
University of Jerusalem, Israel.
sun.uakom.cs
Slovakia. Has a slow link, only use from nearby.
info.funet.fi
(or telnet 128.214.6.100) Not available when tested in
O29-Oct-92. (FINLAND)
Obtaining browsers
The preferred method of access of the Web is to run a browser
yourself. Browsers are available for many platforms, both in source
and executable forms. Here is a list generated from the authoritative
list, http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Clients.html ...
Terminal based browsers
Line Mode Browser
This program gives W3 readership to anyone with a dumb
terminal. A general purpose information retrieval tool.
"Lynx" full screen browser
This is a hypertext browser for vt100s using full screen,
arrow keys, highlighting, etc.
NJIT's Browser
Assumes a character-grid terminal with cursor addressing,
and provides a full-screen interface to the web.
Tom Fine's perlWWW
A tty-bbased browser written in perl.
Graphic User Interfaces
XMosaic
Browser using X11/Motif. Beta, but works well.
Macintosh Browser
Browser for the Macintosh. (Alpha.)
"Cello" PC/Windows client
Browser for windows. (Not yet released)
"Erwise"
Browser for X/Motif. (Unsupported).
"ViolaWWW" Browser for X11
Browser for X11. (Beta, unsupported)
tkWWW Browser
Browser for X11. (Beta)
MidasWWW Browser
WWW browser for X/Motif. (Beta, works well.)
Browser-Editor on the NeXT
A browser/editor for NeXTStep. Allows wysiwyg hypertext
editing. Requires NeXTStep 3.0
Unreleased
Browser on CERNVM
A full-screen browser for VM. Nonexistant. Use the line
mode www.
Information providers run programs that the browsers can obtain
hypertext from. These programs can either be fully-fledged servers
(best if you are creating your information database from scratch), or
can be "gateway" programs that convert an existing information format
to hypertext.
CERN's server is available for anonymous FTP from:
info.cern.ch
ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu
and many other places. Use archie to search for "www" or "WWW" to
find copies close to you.
See http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Overview.html for more
information on writing gateways and for servers in general.
While all three of these information presentation systems are
client-server based, they differ in terms of their model of data. In
gopher, data is either a menu, a document, an index or a telnet
connection. In WAIS, everything is an index and everything that is
returned from the index is a document. In WWW, everything is a
hypertext document which may be searchable.
In practice, this means that WWW can represent the gopher (a menu is a
list of links, a gopher document is a hypertext document without
links, searches are the same, telnet sessions are the same) and WAIS
(a WAIS index is a searchable page, returning a document with no
links) data models as well as providing extra functionality.
The principal difference between the three systems, it turns out, is
deployment. WWW does not have as large a user base as gopher, mainly
because of the small number of WWW browsers that are out. This is
changing as WWW slowly reaches critical mass. Furthermore, users can
look forward to a merging of the three protocols so that both gopher
and WWW understand hypertext, which is served using the WAIS
protocol.
One of the few limitations of the web is that there is currently no
way to find out what has changed, what is new, or even what is out
there. As a result, a definitive list of the web's contents is
impossible at this moment.