October 16, 2004

So are you adventurers prepared to step into the WWW? Hope you have your swords (antivirus), shields (firewall) and armour (anti-spyware) on, otherwise, do not venture online.

So let’s start. To surf the WWW, you need two things. A Dialup connection from an ISP and a web browser. Oh! You don’t know what a browser is? Let me explain it to you. In simple words, a browser is a program that lets you surf the WWW. Let me explain further.

You see in the early days of the Internet, when computers were larger than the size of your room, people used to surf the Internet (which incidentally was a lot smaller), through special commands on their ‘Terminals’. Terminals were a type of special computer which only had a monitor and keyboard and were connected to the larger than the room computer (called a ‘Mainframe’). These terminals depended on that mainframe for everything. You had no GUI (Graphical User Interface — what you’re looking at on your monitor) then, so everything on the monitor was just a lot of letters, words, and numbers, and you had to type to do everything, because the mouse came much later.

However, when the computers started becoming more powerful and cheaper, and the GUI came people felt that an easier way to access the internet was needed, which also didn’t have to require learning hundreds of those commands. So the first graphical browser called ‘NCSA Mosaic’ was developed at the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications in the early ‘90s. This ‘program’ would send those same commands (which people had to type before) when you would click on different buttons and the easy-to-use point-and-click interface helped bring the net to everyone. Then when Windows OS came, it had its own built-in browser called ‘Internet Explorer’ and so more and more people started finding out about the Internet. This really helped in setting off the revolution which we call the WWW.

So basically the browser is the program ‘Internet Explorer’ available in your version of Windows. We’ll be using IE for surfing the web too. However, Explorer is not the only browser that you can use to surf the net. Another popular web browser (which will also speed up your net connection) is FireFox. This is available (free of charge) from www.mozilla.org. We would recommend that you use FireFox, because even though Explorer is a good browser, it attracts and runs Malware automatically, which as you will remember can cause a lot of problems. Also, it is slower in processing web pages. Here, let me tell you how browsers work.

Any Website that you visit is made up of WebPages written in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) code. Too confusing? Let’s take an example. Say you want your own Website with your name, picture, and your hobbies. Now a Website is made up of many WebPages e.g. if you have your name and picture on one WebPage, and your hobbies on another page, your website will consist of two WebPages. To make these pages, you will code in HTML and each page will have its own HTML code. It is this HTML code that tells the browsers what to do and how to display a website. For example you might tell the browser to place your picture on the right, and your name in BOLD letters. So when you open your browser and type the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) e.g. www.yourname.com, your browser will go to the website and display the Webpage the way you wanted it. FireFox reads this HTML code much faster than Explorer does, so we say it ‘processes’ pages faster, which also means you get faster speed.

So now you’re comfortable with how browsers work, let’s double click on IE’s or Firefox’s icon and let’s go to my favourite website. Type www.yahoo.com in the space. Yahoo! We’re online and surfing the web. See all those words on the page, point your mouse on top and click and ... you’ve transported to another webpage. These words are called ‘HyperLinks’ or ‘links’ for short and are what really make the Internet so much fun and if you want to see Yahoo’s HTML code, in ‘Internet Explorer’, go to VIEW - Source. See all those weird brackets and words. That’s HTML.

Next time, we’ll explore the WWW in more details, but until then happy surfing.

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