[To obtain the latest versions of the documents in this section, see the document home sites index.]
The World-Wide Web was originally developed at CERN, the European nuclear physics research centre, as a way of letting researchers share documents easily. Web clients (browsers, like the one you're using to read this) request documents from a web server using an application protocol called HTTP, the HyperText Transmission Protocol. Most web browsers can also handle other protocols, including FTP, email and news. The Web has now grown to the point where many people think it is the Internet.
Web documents are written using a markup language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is derived from another standard called SGML (Standardised General Markup Language). You can see what the raw HTML form of a document like this looks like by choosing the "view document source" or "view frame source" commands in Netscape's "View" menu.
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| The WWW FAQ (answers to Frequently Asked Questions about the Web) |
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| A quick guide to writing HTML documents which lets you experiment with HTML while you read |
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| NCSA's Beginner's Guide to HTML, a more thorough introduction to HTML for beginners |
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| A tutorial on HTML tables |
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| A tutorial on HTML frames |
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| A tutorial on HTML forms |
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| A comprehensive guide and reference to HTML 3.2 (also known as Wilbur) |
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| A tutorial on JavaScript, a scripting language for use in HTML documents |
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| The CGI Programming FAQ from the newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi |
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| The Perl CGI FAQ, all about writing CGI (Common Gateway Inteface) scripts in Perl |
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| Windows Sockets: A Quick and Dirty Primer shows you how to write Winsock (Internet) applications for Windows. |
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| Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) (RFC 1738), the specification that defines what all those pesky "http://this.that/the.other" web addresses really mean! |
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| The HTML 3.2 specification |
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| The WINSOCK specification version 1.0: the Windows Sockets specification for writing Internet applications for Windows. |
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| Several web browsers |
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| A few web servers |
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| Lots of HTML editors |
| The World-Wide Web consortium (W3C), which is now the standards body for the Web and HTML, so this is the place to look for Web and HTML documents and tutorials. |
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| Connect: an Internet Encyclopedia is a wonderful collection of material about the Internet, including dozens of RFCs and tutorial material. You can also download copies for your own use (but watch out, it's big!) |
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| An excellent interactive online HTML tutorial by my colleague Mike Smith |
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| The HTML Reference Manual at Sandia National Laboratories |
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| The Library of Congress index of links about HTML |
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| Yahoo, one of the most comprehensive Web search engines. There is also a UK-based Yahoo which is generally faster from within the UK. |
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| AltaVista, another very comprehensive search engine. |
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| Lycos, yet another general-purpose search engine. |