What is the World Wide Web?
The World Wide Web (WWW or W3) although considered by many to be the Internet, it is in fact just a tool for accessing the Internet. This misconception can be traced to the fact that when the Internet is subjected to investigation by television, you are shown a computer conected to the Internet via the WWW. You see lots of graphics and a nice user interface where you point and click with your mouse to navigate your way around. I suspect that in the future this will be the way of things, that all of the complexity of the Internet will be packaged up in icons and buttons, but for now the WWW is just part of the Internet as you will have seen from the previous chapters.

One of the main attractions of the WWW is its friendly user interface. No UNIX commands. No command line prompts. Once you have accessed a WWW site you are in point and click heaven. Each site that you visit is linked to many other sites. A simple click of the mouse allows you to access those sites. In this way information about a particular subject can be stored on many different systems around the world, but accessed from one single WWW site.

Hyper HyperText
The WWW is a hypertext system. If you have used other hypertext help systems on an Acorn or other computer you will find the WWW very easy to use. A page of hypertext contains links within it. On a WWW page these can be within the text, a graphic, or associated with an icon. Textual links are usually in a different colour or underlined. Graphical links are just the pictures or icons that are displayed or 'hot' areas within the graphic, so that one picture can have several links associated with it. Browsers will often display the address of the page that will be accessed, so that you can determine which areas of a graphic are 'hot' or which are not. Generally pages that contain graphical links also have equivalent textual links, allowing users with text based WWW browsers access the same facilities as those with graphical browsers.

WWW pages are created using a special programming language called HTML - HyperText Markup Language. Each page is defined by a series of commands that are interpreted by your browser to build the page. It is this language that enables the hypertext links, graphics, sound and moving images to be embedded within the page. 

What the URL is going on?
To access a WWW site you need to know its address. WWW site addresses take the form of a URL (uniform or universal resource locator). These are not of the same form as the domain names we use for FTP or email, but will rather contain them. For example my Internet provider has the URL of:

http://www.demon.co.uk/

The bit before the forward slashes defines what transfer protocol will be used to access the site. HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. This is the basic protocol that allows WWW pages to be shipped from the WWW site to your WWW browser. This first part can contain other protocol types such as FTP, but more of that later. The bit after the two forward slashes, and before the next forward slash, is the domain name of the WWW site. The last forward slash means display the home page (the first page you see when you access the WWW site) of this site. Most URL's will have a pathname after this point that will define which page at the WWW site you want to access, for example:

http://info.ox.ac.uk/help/wwwfaq/index.html

This is the address for a WWW page at an Oxford University WWW site (info.ox.ac.uk) that displays the World Wide Web FAQ. The pathname help/wwwfaq/ tells the us where to find the page and index.html is the page itself. This is a good page to look at before starting on your WWW exploits as it provides a lot of useful information about the WWW.

Browsing the Web
Before you can access the WWW you need a web browser. These come in two basic forms: textual and graphical. Textual browsers will only display text, whereas graphical browsers will display both text and graphics. Whilst graphical browsers are the way to go for accessing the WWW, you do have other options: you can access the web via a telnet session and even by email. To use a telnet session, telnet to:

nxoc01.cern.ch

When connected you will be prompted to select various options by typing in the numbers associated with them. These options reflect the hypertext links that would be displayed by a WWW browser.

To access the WWW by email, send an email message to webmail@curia.ucc.ie containing the following:

GO http://www.earn.net/gnrt/www.html

This will return an HTML file, along with a UUencoded version of it in text, giving more information about the WWW and how to access it. You will require an application to decode the UUencoded file.

One stop Internet access
Using a fully-fledged WWW browser will allow you to access FTP, Gopher, WAIS, Telnet, Usenet news and email all via the same interface. Whilst this has the advantage that you only need to learn how to use your WWW browser, its disadvantage is that the WWW is notoriously slow to use.

Speeding up the Web
One of the main ways to increase the speed of accessing WWW pages when using a graphical web browser, is to find the option to turn off the graphics display. This is not as stupid as it sounds because, once you reach a page whose graphics you might want to see, you can turn the graphics option back on, and reload the page. The time taken in downloading all the previous pages as text will be more than made up for in reloading the page you want and seeing it in all its glory.

Most browsers offer the facility to cache pages. This involves keeping a copy of the page on disc so that if you want to backtrack to that page you can load it from your hard disc rather than downloading the page once again. This is considerably quicker and your browser will be able to store several previous pages.

When you find a page that interests you and you think you are likely to return to it, you can add it to a hotlist of WWW pages. A hotlist is just a list of URL's that your browser will maintain between your sessions on the WWW, so that you can return to the page with a single click on the hotlist entry.

Finally, you can make use of proxy WWW servers. These are machines through which you can access the WWW. They store recent copies of very popular WWW pages. When you request that page via the proxy server, it will send you its copy of the page instead of sending your request on to the particular site in question. This can speed up access to popular sites enormously, but as the load on the proxy server increases, its response time will fall off, so the advantage you gain can be variable.