Introduction to the Internet
The internet is a bunch of different computers in different places hooked together
so that they can send information to each other. It was started A server is a computer that
contains information accessible to other computers. Our intranet within Moody has
servers to which the other computers can talk. A server on the internet has a URL,
or universal resource locater, which is something like an address on the internet. If
you want to access a server, you use a piece of software called a browser, such
as Netscape Navigator. You can enter the URL and you will be connected to the server.
HTML,
hypertext markup language, is the most common language used to
present information on the internet. Hypertext is text containing
links that allow you to jump to related text, either in another part of the same
document, or in a completely different document. You are presently reading an
HTML document, which is interpreted and displayed by your browser. If you want to
see how HTML looks when it is written, on Navigator select the view
menu, then select page source. If you want to learn to prepare documents
for the internet in HTML, try the
HTML
Primer from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the
University of Illinois.
Search Engines
will help you find information that may be out there on
the internet, but you don't know where. My favorite is
Excite, which is particulary good if you enter
several words or a phrase. I usually get the most relevant information, with the
least irrelevant information, with Excite. If it happens that you don't get anything, try
Hotbot. It reads web pages and indexes them according
to the terms they contain. Another source of data, which isn't really a search engine, is
Yahoo, which has links to web sites arranged by category.