How do I use the WWW ?

	The World Wide Web (often abbreviated as WWW or W3) is the youngest and probably the most exciting service, the Internet has to offer. Other Internet services are mostly textual orientated, whereas the World Wide Web combines text, graphics and sound. All these items are presented like a page of a book or a newspaper. Such documents often have links to other pages.
	What do I need ? As with most of the other services you will need client software, called a web browser and the address of a site to connect to. Browsers are available for nearly every operating system. The most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator, MS Internet Explorer and NCSA Mosaic, where Netscape Navigator, which is currently available in version 3.0 is the most popular browser. But Microsoft's Internet Explorer has become a strong contender. Internet Explorer Netscape Navigator NCSA Mosaic Hot Java Oracle Powerbrowser Aridana Internet Explorer Netscape Navigator NCSA Mosaic Netscape Navigator is also avaliable via anonymous ftp from ftpX.netscape.com, where X is a number from 2 to 20. Top
	Where can I connect ? There are tons of servers, you can connect to. You will find many information starting from latest UFO sightings to cooking recepies and many companies, offering product information or latest updates and patches for computer software. The IIC offers lots of links, which you can use to start your exploration or have a look at Yahoo, one of the biggest archives of web pages available. They have categories which you can browse to locate the desired information. Top
	Configuring your Web Browser Most web browsers have special features, like a built in e-mail client or the possibility to read news. Using these special features requires some setup information. Among these features, there are other things, that might enhance your viewing pleasure significantly. E-Mail and News There is a special HTML tag, which allows to send e-mail to a specific address. But before this will work, you have to configure your browser to support e-mail. How to do this, is different for each browser. Netscape Navigator has a dialog under the Options menu, which is Mail and News Preferences. When selecting this menu, a dialog will pop up. Locate the Identity and Servers tab. The identity tab will allow you to enter your full e-mail address, your real name, a reply-to address and a signature. The servers tab will allow you to enter the address of the server to connect to, to send outgoing mail and receive incoming mail. It also allows you to specify the address of a news server. Netscape has two separate windows for managing mails and news. To see these windows, click the appropriate commands in the Window menu. If you are using MS Internet Explorer, there is nothing to do to set it up for mail. Internet Explorer uses Microsoft's own mail client, Exchange. You must have Exchange properly configured to use the e-mail feature from Internet Explorer. If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0, then you might want to have a look at the Mail and News Add Ins. These are fully featured E-Mail and News Clients that can be used in conjunction with IE 3.0. Cache Most browsers are using a cache to store already visited pages. This cache is either stored in your computer's working memory (RAM) or on your local harddisk or both. The purpose for a cache is to provide a mechanism to reload pages or page elements like graphics, which have recently by visited for a fast reload. Modern cache mechanisms always ensure, that the most up to date page is displayed, which means, that your browser will check, which page is more accurate, the one in the cache or the one on a server. If you have enough hard disk space and memory available, then set the size as big as possible; especially the disk cache. This will speed up page display of your favorite sites. You will find Netscape's cache settings in the Options menu under the Network Preferences command. At the dialog, click the cache settings. There you will find two buttons, which allow the clear each cache. Also a directory can be specified, where the disk cache should reside. Internet Explorer users will find cache settings in the View menu under the Options command. In the dialog click the Extended tab. Whereas Netscape Navigatior allows to specify the exact maximum size of the cache, Internet Explorer only allows you specify a percentage of available free disk space. Also you can specify a cache directory. Proxy Servers A proxy server is also a kind of cache, with the difference, that the cache is not on your local computer rather than a server somewhere in the Internet. Ask your ISP for the address of his proxy server. You can specify a proxy for each Internet service. There is no more than specifying the correct proxy server address. Netscape Navigator users will find proxy server configuration in the Options menu under the Network Preferences tab. Click of Manual configuration to manually configure (that is, enter the address manually) proxy servers. Internet Explorer 3.0 users have to go to Windows's Control Panel and select the Internet icon. In the dialog select Proxy Server. This dialog is also accessible from within Internet Explorer itself. Use View, Options, Connection tab. Top
	How do I use the WWW ? Unlike other server addresses, you need to expand the address of a server with its URL, because a web browser can also be used to connect to other services. Except from some URLs, the general form of an URL is URL://address/directory:port/document where address is the address of the server you want to connect to, directory is the directory you want to access on the remote server, port is the port number you want to connect to and document is the full name and extension of the document you want to view. Note that directory, port and document may be omitted. URL has to be replaced with one of the following: URL Description http:// short for: Hypertext Transfer Protocol. This is the default protocol for transferring HTML Documents. gopher:// Connecting to a gopher service ftp:// Connecting to a ftp service news: (without the //) Reading a Usenet Newsgroup. Note that your browser most be properly configured for news and your news server has to carry this groups. telnet: (without the //) Starting a telnet session mailto: (without the //) Send mail to the specified address. TABLE 2.10.1: Valid URLs and explanations.. Here are some examples of valid URLs: http://www.iic.priv.at/iic http://www.somehost.somewhere ftp://ftp.a.host ftp://ftp.a.host/filename.txt (retrieves the specified file) gopher://gopher.service news:alt.binaries.windows.shareware mailto: cf@magnet.at telnet:192.56.23.2 As seen in an above example, in addition to the address you can specify a directory and/or filename. If you are using ftp://ftp.at.somewhere/directory/file.txt, then the file file.txt will be download. If your browser is capable of displaying the downloaded file, then it will do so, otherwise a dialog will appear prompting you for a filename to save the file. Navigating the Web When you have a look at a web page, you might have noticed some text that has a different color and is underlined or a picture with a (normally) blue frame around it.. These elements are called hyperlinks. If you position the mouse over such an element, then will notice the mouse arrow changing. A hyperlink will normally take you to another world wide web document either on the same server or a different one on the other side of the world. After you have followed several hyperlinks, you might want to return to a previous document. Therefore browsers offer a Back and Forward button, which allow to browse back or forward through already visited documents. Also, browsers often offer a history, where a list of all recently visited sites can be found and you can return to a recent site by selecting an entry from the history list. Netscape 2.0 has this list in the Go menu. An imagemap is another way of navigating the web. Imagemaps are graphics, where different sections of the graphics are linked to different documents. There are server side imagemaps and client side imagemaps. Client side imagemaps are new and only understood by new browsers like Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Internet Explorer 2.0. You can easily determine wether the imagemap is server side or client side. Move your mouse of the imagemap and watch the mouse arrow change. Now watch the status line of your browser. If you see two digits changing when moving your mouse, then you are dealing with a server side imagemap. If you see the names of the linked documents, then you are dealing with a client side imagemap. Many web pages offer the opportunity to directly contact the author(s) of these pages to either submit feedback or send them special information. You would deal with this forms like you would in any normal window-based applications. There are edit boxes, radio buttons, lists and comboboxes. Normally you will find two buttons, labeled submit or Clear. Pressing the submit button will send the entered information to the author. Clear will erase all entries in a form and allow you to start all over. Top
	Additional Information Custom start page Browsers offer the opportunity the define a kind of a startup page, which is also called homepage. This page will be loaded automatically, as soon as your web client has been started. To define a homepage for Netscape 3.0, open the Option menu and locate the General Preferences command. In the dialog, click on the Appearance tab. Now enter your favorite start page. When using Internet Explorer 3.0 go to your favorite start page and select Options from the View menu and click on the Start- and Searchpage tab. Now click on Current page for your start page. To jump to your home page from anywhere, press the Home button in your browser. Transfer Indicator All web browsers do have somewhere a small animation somewhere in their window. This animation indicates, that the browser is currently busy transferring data from the server. If the browser has finished, then you will see a static picture instead of the animation. Also many browsers display the amount of already transferred data in the status bar. During your journey through the web you will find many pages with lots of graphics. Loading and displaying these graphics might take very long so you may want to switch automated load of the images off. Most browsers offer this option. Of course you can load all images in a document later on demand. HTML Pages on the World Wide Web are made created using a special Language. This language is called HTML. HTML can be seen as a page description language, which describes, who a page should look like. There currently are several HTML versions. The latest version is V3.2. From Version to Version, enhancements are being made to HTML. Also Browser manufracturers add special tags, which are not part of the standard HTML, to their Browsers. These tags can only be interpreted by this specific browser, while other browser ignore these tags. The result is, that a page might look different on different browsers. So we recommend always using the latest browser to view everything as it is intended to be viewed.

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