Contents

1. Recent changes to the FAQ

These are most recent changes.

2. Information about this document

This is an introduction to the World-Wide Web project, describing the concepts, software and access methods. It is aimed at people who know a little about navigating the Internet, but want to know more about WWW specifically. If you don't think you are up to this level, try Ed Krol's "The Whole Internet".

This informational document is posted to news.answers, comp.infosystems.gopher, comp.infosystems.wais and alt.hypertext on the 1st and 15th of every month (please allow a day or two for it to propagate to your site). The latest version is always available on the web as http://www.vuw.ac.nz:80/non-local/gnat/www-faq.html (see the section titled "What is a URL?" to understand what this means).

The most recently posted version of this document is kept on the news.answers archive on rtfm.mit.edu in /pub/usenet/news.answers/www-faq (the URL for this is file://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet/news.answers/www-faq). For information on FTP, send e-mail to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu with "send usenet/news.answers/finding-sources" in the body, instead of asking me.

Nathan Torkington maintains this document. Feedback about it is to be sent via e-mail to Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz

In all cases, regard this document as out of date. Definitive information should be on the web, and static versions such as this should be considered unreliable at best.

3. What are WWW, hypertext and hypermedia?

WWW stands for the "World Wide Web". The WWW project, started and driven by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), seeks to build a distributed hypermedia system.

To access the web, you run a browser program. The browser reads documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers set up hypermedia servers which browsers can get documents from.

The browsers can, in addition, access files by FTP, NNTP (the Internet news protocol), gopher and an ever-increasing range of other methods. On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of documents and databases.

The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents. Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in a transparent way -- select the pointer, and you are presented with the text that is pointed to.

Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations.

4. What is a URL?

URL stands for "Uniform Resource Locator". It is a draft standard for specifying an object on the Internet, such as a file or newsgroup.

URLs look like this:

The first part of the URL, before the colon, specifies the access method. The part of the URL after the colon is interpreted specific to the access method. In general, two slashes after the colon indicate a machine name (machine:port is also valid). For more information, see

5. How can I access the web?

You have two options -- either use a browser that can be telnetted to, or use a browser on your machine.

5.1 Browsers accessable by telnet

An up-to-date list of these is available on the Web as http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/FAQ/Bootstrap.html and should be regarded as an authoritative list.
info.cern.ch
No password is required. This is in Switzerland, so continental US users might be better off using a closer browser.
ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu
A full screen browser "Lynx" which requires a vt100 terminal. Log in as www.
eies2.njit.edu
(or telnet 128.235.1.43) Log in as www. A full-screen browser in New Jersey Institute of Technology. USA.
vms.huji.ac.il
(IP address 128.139.4.3). A dual-language Hebrew/English database, with links to the rest of the world. The line mode browser, plus extra features. Log in as www. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
sun.uakom.cs
Slovakia. Has a slow link, only use from nearby.
info.funet.fi
(or telnet 128.214.6.100) Not available when tested in O29-Oct-92. (FINLAND)

5.2 Obtaining browsers

The preferred method of access of the Web is to run a browser yourself. Browsers are available for many platforms, both in source and executable forms. Here is a list generated from the authoritative list, http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Clients.html ...
Terminal based browsers
Line Mode Browser
This program gives W3 readership to anyone with a dumb terminal. A general purpose information retrieval tool.
"Lynx" full screen browser
This is a hypertext browser for vt100s using full screen, arrow keys, highlighting, etc.
NJIT's Browser
Assumes a character-grid terminal with cursor addressing, and provides a full-screen interface to the web.
Tom Fine's perlWWW
A tty-bbased browser written in perl.
Graphic User Interfaces
XMosaic
Browser using X11/Motif. Works well. This is the most polished browser.
Macintosh Browser
Browser for the Macintosh. (Alpha.)
"Cello" PC/Windows client
Browser for windows. (Not yet released)
"Erwise"
Browser for X/Motif. (Unsupported).
"ViolaWWW" Browser for X11
Browser for X11. (Beta, unsupported)
tkWWW Browser
Browser for X11. (Beta).
MidasWWW Browser
WWW browser for X/Motif. (Beta, works well.)
Browser-Editor on the NeXT
A browser/editor for NeXTStep. Allows wysiwyg hypertext editing. Requires NeXTStep 3.0
Unreleased
Browser on CERNVM
A full-screen browser for VM. Nonexistant. Use the line mode www.
Dave Ragget's Browser
Unreleased. For X11, (later PC?)

6. How can I provide information to the web

Information providers run programs that the browsers can obtain hypertext from. These programs can either be WWW servers that understand the HyperText Transfer Protocol HTTP (best if you are creating your information database from scratch), "gateway" programs that convert an existing information format to hypertext, or a non-HTTP server that WWW browsers can access -- anonymous FTP or gopher, for example.

If you only want to provide information to local users, placing your information in local files is also an option. This means that there would be no off-machine access.

CERN's server is available for anonymous FTP from info.cern.ch and many other places. Use archie to search for "www" or "WWW" to find copies close to you. NCSA have their own server, for FTP from ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu.

See http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Daemon/Overview.html for more information on writing gateways and for servers in general.

7. How does WWW compare to gopher and WAIS?

While all three of these information presentation systems are client-server based, they differ in terms of their model of data. In gopher, data is either a menu, a document, an index or a telnet connection. In WAIS, everything is an index and everything that is returned from the index is a document. In WWW, everything is a (possibly) hypertext document which may be searchable.

In practice, this means that WWW can represent the gopher (a menu is a list of links, a gopher document is a hypertext document without links, searches are the same, telnet sessions are the same) and WAIS (a WAIS index is a searchable page, returning a document with no links) data models as well as providing extra functionality.

The principal difference between the three systems, it turns out, is deployment. WWW does not have as large a user base as gopher, mainly because of the small number of WWW browsers that are out. This is changing as WWW reaches critical mass (usage of the server at CERN doubles every 4 months -- twice the rate of Internet expansion).

8. What is on the web?

Currently accessable through the web:

One of the few limitations of the current networked information systems is that there is no simple way to find out what has changed, what is new, or even what is out there. As a result, a definitive list of the web's contents is impossible at this moment.

9. I want to know more

To find out more, use the web.

Credits