Center for Rural Studies

 

UVM Extension Service

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University of Vermont

 

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Burlington, VT 05405-0106

 

Montpelier, VT 05602-8927

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February 2001
Lesson 11

 

Lesson 11: WWW (Part I)

"Ah! the clock is always slow; It is later than you think." -- Robert W. Service, It is Later Than You Think

I wish we had six weeks just to talk about the World Wide Web (a.k.a. WWW or "the Web.").

Unfortunately, we *don't* have six weeks to talk about the Web -- we only have Lessons. Because of this, we are going to go through the Web like Sherman went through Georgia (1) .

That's the bad news. The good news is that there are a lot of REALLY good Web guides available. I have made "links" of several excellent WWW guides and starting places at the end of this lesson. The Town Officer Connectivity Project web site has many links to resources for town officers, and is listed below as well.

For now, however, let's talk about the BASICS of the Web.   Later we will talk about how to search using the web (Lesson 13), and cover some tips and new services using the web (Lesson 12).

The Web's name is based on the capability for documents to be linked together. It is possible to read one document, find a keyword in that document that really interests you, touch that keyword, and automatically be taken to a NEW document somewhere else in the world -- and this new document could even have links to OTHER documents around the world, and so on.

Sound too good to be true? It isn't, thanks to something called "hypertext." If you have ever played with Apple's Hypercard program or the "help" menus in the latest Microsoft packages, you have already experienced hypertext. You "select" a highlighted word -- usually by clicking on it with a mouse -- and you are taken into an entirely new document or help screen.

The World Wide Web is based on hypertext. It is possible for you to go roaming around the Web, bouncing from document to document, using nothing but the links in those documents!

Last lesson I told about a software program (client) called a "browser", and how a browser can read documents, fetch documents, access files by FTP, read Usenet newsgroups, telnet into remote sites, and even travel around Gopherspace.

The Web is able to accomplish all of this thanks to something called URLs -- Universal Resource Locators. URLs list the exact location of *ANY* Internet resource.

If you think about it, giving every Internet resource a unique address is the hard part. Once you have given something an address, linking to it is pretty easy :)

What is really special about the Web is that the Web does all of this "behind the scenes." It is possible for you to bounce from one link to another without ever knowing the exact address of where you are, or even how you got there.

If you ever want to jump *directly* to a particular Internet resource, however, you are going to need to know a little bit more about URLs. Here are a few basic URLs:

Gee ... those look a little like FTP addresses, don't they?

The first part of an URL -- the stuff before the colon -- tells the browser how to access that particular file. For example, to access

  • ftp://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors your browser would use FTP.

    Most of the access methods are pretty straight-forward. Here is a list of some of the more common access methods that you are going to see listed in the first part of URLs:

    Method What It Stands For
    ftp File Transfer Protocol
    file File Transfer Protocol (same as ftp)
    news Internet News Protocol (Usenet)
    gopher Gopher
    telnet Telnet (remote login to a host computer)
    http Hypertext Transport Protocol

    We've used most of these before, except for http. Almost everything these days is available with http. When you see a URL with http at the beginning of it, that means that the file is a hypertext document (with hypertext links to other documents).

    The rest of a URL -- the stuff after the colon -- is the address of that particular file. In general, two slashes (//) after the colon indicates a machine name or address.

    For example,

  • file://crs.uvm.edu/tocp/Andrew/www.txt is the URL for a text file at folder of one of the folks at the Town Officer Connectivity Project.

  • http://info.cern.ch:80 is the URL for a hypertext document at info.cern.ch, port 80. Now as things change on the web you can see how an outdated URL might not go exactly where the original author wanted it to go. In this case you go to a page that is telling you that CERN is or has moved. Check it out. CERN is one of the places where the World Wide Web was born.

    As promised here are the URL's of some WWW guides:

    Homework:

    Send us (crs@uvm.edu ) the addresses of five websites that have been helpful to you as a town official.  We are interested in what you are using, so others may benefit too!

    Sources:
    WWW FAQ, 8 August 1994.

    NOTES:
    (1) General William Tecumseh Sherman was the Union Army General who burned a path 100 miles wide from Atlanta to the sea during the U.S. Civil War.

  • ROADMAP: Copyright Patrick Crispen 1994, 1995. All rights reserved.

    Modified by permission by UVM Extension System, 2001.