Theme 5- Computers

About Internet Services

Key services available for common use to community leaders include:

• The World Wide Web
• Newsgroups
• Internet Relay Chat

For further background information about the development of the World Wide Web check out the following sites.

• Internet 101:
• About html: NSCA Archive: A Beginner’s Guide to html:
• Teresa’s Guide to Learning html:

The World Wide Web

Although the terms Internet and World Wide Web tend to be used interchangeably, the Web is just one of a number of services carried by the Internet.

The World Wide Web is that part of the Internet where you view ‘Internet sites’ using your browser. Internet Explorer and Netscape are examples of browsers. You can think of the WWW as a library, with the millions of sites representing books. However, unlike a library the books (web sites) are not gathered in one place. The web sites sits are located in millions of computers worldwide. As a result, the physical location becomes irrelevant. You can access materials anywhere in the world instantly.

The Web began in the late 1980s when Swiss Physicist, Dr Berners-Lee, wrote a program which allowed pages, in his own computer, to be linked together using key words. He was soon able to link documents in different computers, as long as they were connected to the Internet.

Documents have to be formatted in a particular language before they can be linked. The document formatting language is called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

To view the html language used to create a web page:

• launch (open) your Internet browser
• open any page
• locate your cursor anywhere in the web page
• click the right mouse button
• click on View Source
• click on the X at the top right-hand corner of the html page to return to the web page
  
  Until 1992, the web consisted of mainly text-based pages. However once the first web browser was developed it became possible to access the different types of resources that were beginning to appear on web sites.

Today, resources available on the World Wide Web include:

• text
• graphic images and pictures
• sound clips which you can hear
• movies which you can play, and
• just about anything that can be represented digitally using computer technology

 

Internet Services- continued