World Wide Web, often abbreviated WWW or W3, is one of the newest Internet innovations. The goal of WWW is to make all on-line knowledge part of one web of interconnected documents and services. In WWW you can follow facts or texts from one hypertext link to another, taking as many nonlinear steps as you want.
WWW documents consist of "pages" which often combine text, images and sounds. By selecting certain words, pictures, or icons on a particular page, you are linked to another WWW page or Internet resource which might be the same computer server or on a different computer in another country. Different programs browse the Web in different ways. Using WWW you could, for example, walk through a virtual museum viewing images of certain paintings, listening to famous recordings, and reading related text, all while sitting at your computer.
You can move around the Web in two ways: by browsing and selecting links to explore or by issuing commands to go directly to a specific Internet resource with a URL. See Lynx Commands and URL sections in this guide.
Hypertext is stored in a multi-directional, non-hierarchical structure in which each piece of hypertext or node, is connected to one or more other pieces of hypertext by links. By adding more nodes and links to the structure, a web relationship is formed. Hypertext is like a spider's web in which there are many pathways to get to any particular piece of information. It’s simplicity for moving around the Internet can be disorienting at first, but it is a remarkably powerful way to retrieve information.
Many resources available on the Internet are available via the Web, and the Web is the growing area on the Net. Using World Wide Web you can access all the resources on gopher, WAIS, ftp, the Usenet News groups , or any database available via telnet. The Web provides access both by subject and by means of protocol such as gopher and FTP.
When you select a WWW item you are actually telling a scripted computer program to access the data you requested. The WWW program also creates some screens of data on-the-fly as you access different services. Plus WWW allows you to create your own personal hypertext documents and link them to documents in the wider world of WWW. To reach Webspace at Rio Grande Free-Net type go www at the Your Choice ===) prompt and select the RGFN WWW Lynx browser from the menu.
This program gives W3 readership to anyone with a dumb terminal. It is a general purpose information retrieval tool.
The browser installed on the Rio Grande Free Net is LYNX. See Lynx Commands in this guide. However, by telneting to different locations you can use other line-mode browsers. Note: Mosiac and Netscape browsers are available options on the RGFN at this time and are offered on a test basis.
This is a hypertext browser for vt100s using full screen, arrow keys, and highlighting. This is the available browser on RGFN.
Cello: Browser from Cornell LII
Netscape: from Netscape
Mosaic: From NCSA
Mosaic for Macintosh: From NCSA. Full featured.
NCSA Mosaic for X: Browser using X11/Motif with Multimedia magic ViolaWWW Browser is a browser for X11 (Beta, unsupported) tkWWW for X11 is a browser/editor for X11. (Beta) MidasWWW Browser from Tony Johnson (Beta, works well)
Browser-Editor on the NeXT: A browser/editor for NeXTStep. Allows wysiwyg hypertext editing. Requires NeXtStep 3.0
RGFN User's Guide Copyright 1995: You may copy this guide and distribute it for educational purposes only and not for any other purpose.
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