Surfing on the Web

The Web or WWW or World Wide Web, is a world composed by hypertexts. What's an hypertext? Well, when you read a book, you usually start from first page and - page by page - you reach the end. In other words you have just a chance: you have to read all pages to reach the end. Reading an hypertext, things change. In fact, you can start from any point and you can reach any point. Pages of hypertexts are connected each other by means of links. When you are reading a page, and you find a link, you can choose: either keep on reading that page or skip to another page by 'clicking' on that link. However an hypertext is much more than simple text pages connected each other, in fact it contains text, images and sound. Besides, when you click on a link, you can connect to another computer which contain the page pointed by that link. Ok, this is the Web. Millions of computers connected each other, millions of documents scattered all over the world. However, the Web is not the Internet. The Internet was developed during the last years of '60s, but the Web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee (CERN) in 1991. Ok, what you need to surf on the web? You need a browser. A browser is a program (called client) who ask services to another computer (called server). The server maybe thousands of kilometers far from you, but you don't notice that. Well, browsers maybe: text based browsers or graphic browsers. A text based browser is Lynx, developed at University of Kansas (ftp://ftp2.cc.ukans.edu/pub/lynx). The first graphic browser is Mosaic (by NCSA). Then, the most famous graphic browser arrived: Netscape Navigator (1994). Suddenly (1995) the most famous Netscape's opposing - Microsoft - developed its browser: Internet Explorer. Now I'm going to show you the two most known browsers...but warning: in order to show you these browsers' features, I have gathered a few of pictures. For this reason the following pages will take a while to download, so please, be patient...

Let's dissect Microsoft Internet Explorer

Let's dissect Netscape Navigator

You can download them at: http://www.microsoft.com and http://www,netscape.com but I have never downloaded them from the net (these are HUGE files), in fact as they are freeware programs, you can find them on CDs given by magazines or given by ISPs...Finally: Netscape Communicator sources are available on the net! So developers can examine and handle them. Look at http:///www.mozilla.org for more information.