Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501160019
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TODD COPILEVITZ DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Lately we've talked a lot about the Web, as it's called by those trying to be in the know. But in the next month or so, millions of you will gain your first foothold on the neatest thing the Internet has to offer.
Local Internet service providers around the country, including InfiNet, are offering access today. Prodigy has access to the Web. America Online promises its users won't have long to wait. So, to make sure you're ready, it's time for a little background.
While the Internet has been around a couple of decades, the Web is relatively new, and unique. Consider it the user-friendly portion of the Net, a place where fun things are always happening, important information is a mouse click away, and you don't have to know a computer language to enter.
While other portions of the Net, like newsgroups and gopher, are all text-based files, the Web offers screens full of text combined with pictures, graphics and icons. They're called pages, much like the one you're holding now. The Web equivalent of a newspaper's cover is a home page, sort of the welcoming to a new location.
Browser programs, like Mosaic and Netscape, merge all the Web's potential into powerful, easy-to-use programs. With little or no training, anyone can use one of these programs and be surfing the Net in no time.
That's another phrase everyone likes to use - surfing the Net. The truth is that the Web is so engrossing that people lose hours following topics, discovering treasures. Somehow ``aimless browsing'' doesn't sound like an apt description, so instead we call it surfing.
The magical part of the Web is the hypertext links, highlighted words or phrases. By clicking on a link or an icon you're transported to another page. A page from the University of Illinois may refer to weather information and offer a hypertext link to the National Weather Service's home page. Click it and you're there; it doesn't matter that there happens to be a computer hundreds of miles away from Illinois.
In no time you're clicking links, zipping between computers around the globe, an illustration of which would look like a web of lines, hence the name. If you get lost, there's always a way to retrace your steps, or zip back to the page where you started.
There's a lot of great stuff out there, and a fair amount of wasted electrons. You'll want to share a good page with friends. To do so, you need the URL (uniform resource locator). This is the Web's equivalent of a street address. Capitalization and punctuation must be exact or the URL is worthless.
For example, my favorite starting point is Stanford University's Yahoo index page. If you type http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo in your browser's location blank and hit enter you'll have access to more than 21,000 pages indexed by Yahoo.
Where you go on the Web is a function of your interests, and moods. Lots of important entities, like universities and governments, are putting valuable resources on-line.
But a bunch of computer-crazed enthusiasts are doing strange things, too, like linking cameras, robots and jukeboxes to their computers. Clicking into their pages can bring you face to face with an iguana in a camera's viewfinder, let you peer into a company's lunchroom or hear Socks' recorded meow.
Which leads to another important issue: speed. Sending pictures, sound and even video takes a lot of time. Even with relatively fast 14,400-baud modems, there's going to be some finger-drumming time. Don't even try it with anything slower.
In time you may even go shopping on the Web. Hundreds of merchants are banking on that prospect. The newer browser programs are including all kinds of built-in precautions to safeguard your credit card information.
Whatever you eventually find out there, now is the time to get started on the exploration. One way or another, the Web will get you.
by CNB