🚀 go-pugleaf

Archive-name: www/faq
Maintained-by: Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz (Nathan Torkington)

Contents
********

 o 1. Recent changes to the FAQ 
 o 2. Information about this document 
 o 3. What are WWW, hypertext and hypermedia? 
 o 4. What is a URL? 
 o 5. How can I access the web? 
 o 5.1 Browsers accessable by telnet 
 o 5.2 Obtaining browsers 
 o 6. How can I provide information to the web? 
 o 7. How does WWW compare to gopher and WAIS? 
 o 8. What is on the web? 
 o 9. I want to know more. 
 o Z. Credits 

1. Recent changes to the FAQ
****************************

These are most recent changes. 

 o html-mode.el mentioned 
 o disclaimer for crappy formatting 

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 an introductory Internet book such as 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In all cases, regard this document as out of date.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. Please excuse any formatting
inconsistencies in the posted version of this document, as it is
automatically generated from the on-line version.

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:

 o file://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors/msdos/graphics/gifkit.zip 
 o file://wuarchive.wustl.edu/mirrors 
 o http://info.cern.ch:80/default.html 
 o news:alt.hypertext 
 o telnet://dra.com 

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. 
www.njit.edu
   (or telnet 128.235.163.2) 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. 

To produce HTML, you can either use an SGML editor with the 
HTML DTD (URL is
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/DTDHeading.html), or
use EMACS and html-mode.el (URL is
ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Web/elisp/html-mode.el).

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: 

 o anything served through gopher 
 o anything served through WAIS 
 o anything on an FTP site 
 o anything on Usenet 
 o anything accessable through telnet 
 o anything in hytelnet 
 o anything in hyper-g 
 o anything in techinfo 
 o anything in texinfo 
 o anything in the form of man pages 
 o sundry hypertext documents 

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
*******

 o Nathan Torkington 
 o marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu 
 o Tony Johnson