WWW Overview

Goals

Half hour overview

• What is the internet? The WWW?
• What is the social impact?
• How do you browse?
• URIs

What is the Internet? The WWW?

• Internet
• Web
  • Tim Berners-Lee
  • 1990 at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics
• Amazing growth
• Buzzwords you may encounter: TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, HTTPD, LAN, Dial-up connection, ISP

Social Impact

• Pervasive
• Educated citizenry
• Right vs. privilege?
• Fast communication
• Multimedia
• What can't you do on the web?
• Social Aspects of the Web

How do you browse?

• Via a browser!
• Most common - Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer
• lynx
• Usually fairly intuitive
• Need to be connected to "the internet"

Uniform Resource Identifiers

• Challenge: uniquely identify objects on the web
• Uniform Resource Identifiers
• Examples
  • http://www.ibm.com
  • http://www.cs.unc.edu
  • http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman
  • http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/vegetarian.html
  • http://www.whitehouse.gov
  • ftp://mycomputer.xyz.com
  • telnet://yourcomputer.abc.org
  • file://c:\autoexec.bat
• Can you guess where to find information about Lucent Technologies? The Internal Revenue Service (domain gov)? San Jose State University?

Created September 16, 1998

HTML by Dilip Barman, background courtesy of