What’s it all about?

There is a tendency today to use the word "Internet" to mean World Wide Web. Actually, the Internet is made up of many small "nets", or communication links between computers. These nets transfer very simple information packets to one another. These information packets, when assembled by the computers take many forms. Only one of these forms is a Web page.

Certain rules, or protocols, govern how the computers communicate. The one that is most commonly  associated with the Internet is:

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
Which transmits hypertext over networks. This is the protocol that the Web uses.

A few other protocols that may be familiar to you:

E-mail (SMTP – Simple Mail Transport Protocol)
which distributes electronic messages and files to electronic mailboxes.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
which transfers text and binary files between FTP servers and clients
Telnet (Telnet Protocol)
which facilitates login to a computer server to execute commands.

The language that is most commonly used to display the information available over the web is:

HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
the computer commands used to build web pages, brings us graphics, video and sound as well as text in a web page. It also allows for links to other pages.

Let's take a look at the HyperText Markup Language on our site:

• Hold your mouse over this page and click the right mouse button.
• Choose "View Frame Source" Here you will see the different tags, or commands, in brackets that make web pages look the way they do.
• Close the "Source" window when you are done.

Web browsers today (like Netscape, Internet Explorer and AOL) have made nearly all of the programming language and file transfers invisible to the casual user. This is helpful to those of us who don’t know what commands to send to a remote computer to get it to send us back the information that we want! So, Web browsers make it easy for us by giving us an interface that does the work for us.

We can get to files on the Web by:

1. Entering a web address and accessing the page directly (www.uiuc.edu)
2. Selecting a link on one page and moving to another (hotlinks)
3. Searching through subject directories of organized information (Yahoo!)
4. Searching by entering terms into a search engine of computer gathered information. (Infoseek, Google, etc.)

There are various types of information to be found on the Web. But first, let's remember a few things.

Things inherent in the Web:

• Anyone can publish on the web.
• The web is constantly changing.
• The page you're looking at may be old or inaccurate.

Knowing these things, we do have to proceed with caution – taking the information that we find "with a grain of salt."

Where is this web page coming from?

There are some fairly simple ways to learn something about a web page right off the bat. First of all, its address, or URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locator) tells us important information about where the document is coming from – and perhaps who created it.

A URL can be made up of up to four parts:

protocol://host/path/filename

For example - the URL of the page we are looking at:

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/rex/instruction/Internet/internetresearch.htm

1. The protocol is http for Hypertext transfer protocol (we know we’re going to be looking at a web page)
   
2. The host (or server where the page is kept) is www.library.uiuc.edu

   www (the host computer name)
   library (second level domain name assigned to our library)
   uiuc (a second- level domain name given to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
   edu (standing for an educational institution – top level domain name)

3. After that the path, or directory names, that are listed are:

   rex (standing for the Reference library)
   instruction (denoting the instruction section of their pages)
   Internet (directory referring to the subject of this workshop)

4. And then lastly, the filename:

internetresearch.htm (the actual title of this internet file)

This may seem confusing when we look at long URLs like this one, but, it is important information – particularly the first part: the domain. There are several recognizable domains on the Web that can tell you about the place the Web page is coming from. You may have heard of "dot-com" sites – which refer to commercial enterprises, i.e. .com (www.amazon.com) , or in general, sites that are posted to increase business by either Internet sales or advertising.

Domains:

.edu – Which we have already touched on, an Education site (www.iu.edu)
.gov – a U.S. government site (www.cia.gov)
.mil – a U.S. military site (www.weather.pentagon.mil)
.net – a network access provider (or not) (www.webtv.net and www.nando.net)
.org – a (usually nonprofit) organization (www.bbb.org)

Besides these, many domain names have also been assigned to different countries, and are referred to as two-letter Internet country codes. A few that you may see often are:

de Germany (www.bmbf.de)
ie Ireland (www.emigrant.ie)
jp Japan (http://www.japantimes.co.jp)
uk United Kingdom (www.vmg.co.uk)

This does not mean that the information on web pages with these domain names is in any way official – it is simply originating from servers in these countries. For more information about domain names belonging to particular countries, take a look at Domain name registries around the world (http://www.uninett.no/navn/domreg.html).

In November of 2000, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) chose 7 new top-level domain names.  (www.icann.org/tlds)   These domains are expected to be available for use later in 2001.

Now that we know a little about what kind of information is found in a Web sites’ address we can make an educated guess about what pages are the most trustworthy. For example if you were to receive a letter by U.S. mail from a University of Illinois address informing you that you owe a balance on your tuition bill, you are going to be fairly likely to believe it. On the other hand, if you were to receive a similar letter with a return address and postmark of Biloxi, Mississippi, this time instructing you to send a money order for the balance of your tuition to John T. Doe, you would be rather skeptical.