| English Composition | Spring 2000 | Palomar College |
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You'll learn quite a bit about the Internet and the Web this semester, but we do assume that you have done at least a little bit of Web browsing and are familiar with the most basic Web tools and concepts. If you don't have any Web experience, then you should start by reading through this page, which will acquaint you with the terms and techniques that you'll need.
The easiest way to think of a Web site is as a place that you can visit, a place that has a number of interconnected pages that you can view. Right now you're "visiting" the DI website and reading one of its pages -- the one called "Web Basics." Some pages, including this one, are too long to fit on a single screen, so you have to use the Page Up and Page Down keys or the scrollbar (the bar with arrows on the right side of the screen) to scroll through them; but even if you scroll up or down, you're still on the same Web page. To get to a different page, you have to use one of the various navigational tools which will be described below.
The program that you use to view Web pages is called a Web browser. Just as a word processor lets you open and view text files that are stored on your hard drive, a Web browser lets you retrieve and view Web pages that are stored somewhere else on the Web (we'll look into this process in greater detail in the section on the Internet). It also handles all your navigation and allows you to do such things as saving and printing pages and creating "bookmarks" or "favorites" which allow you to return directly to a specific page in a later browsing session. There are a number of different browsers, the most popular of which are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Each browser has its own look and feel, but they also have a lot in common, and most of the functions that you'll need this semester work the same in all the major browsers. For help with your specific browser, you can consult the Help menu (which, like all the other menus and icons at the top of the screen, is part of your browser, not part of the Web page).
The most basic way to navigate between Web pages is to click on a link, which is a special spot on the page that's set up to send you automatically to some other page. Links can be text-based, in which case they're usually words that appear in a different color and are underlined; or they can be graphics-based, in which case they're usually represented by either a whole picture or a smaller, "clickable" region of a larger picture. Depending on the site, graphics-based links may or may not have boxes around them that are the same color as text-based links. If you're not sure whether something is a link, position your mouse cursor over it without clicking. Anytime the cursor is over a link it will change shape (usually, from an arrow to a hand) and the browser's status bar will display a little piece of text called a URL, or Universal Resource Locator, that describes what the link points to.
What a link really does when you click on it is send your browser a little line of text called a URL, or Universal Resource Locator.
URLs contain all the information that your browser needs to find a given Web page. You've probably seen them on billboards and in TV ads -- they're the things starting with "http://" followed by some more letters and periods. Depending on your browser's configuration, there's probably one displayed in the "location" box at the top of your screen right now; that's the URL for this particular page. What really happens when you click on a link is that your browser decodes the corresponding URL -- the one displayed in the status bar -- and loads the corresponding page. As an alternative to clicking on a link, you can always just clear whatever is in the location box, type the URL of the page you want to visit, and hit return (or enter).
To help you keep track of where you've been, most text-based links and boxes around graphical links change colors after you've used them once. Days or weeks later they may change back (this depends on the size of your cache, which will be explained later), but in the meantime you can use the color change to avoid going around in circles.
Since manual entry of URLs is rather tedious, all browsers have some sort of "bookmark" tool that lets you mark a page for later reference. If you open the Bookmarks menu in Navigator or the Favorites menu in Explorer, you'll see a list of pages that you can visit just by clicking on their names. Anytime you're viewing a page, you can add it to that list by selecting the Add Bookmark or Add to Favorites command from that same menu. An over-cluttered bookmark list can be difficult to use, so it's usually a good idea to bookmark only the "home" or "front" page of any given site, and then rely on links to get from that page to any other on the same site.
There are some buttons built into your browser that let you perform common navigational tasks. The most important of these is the Back button, which is a left-pointing arrow or diamond that should be near the upper-left corner of your browser window, just below the menu bar (if you don't see any arrow buttons at all, open the View menu and be sure that the Toolbar option is checked or the Hide Navigation Toolbar option is unchecked). The Back button takes you back to the last page that you were reading before the current one; if you click it multiple times, it will take you back through all the pages that you've viewed in the current browsing session. If you go back too far, you can also use the right-pointing Forward button, which takes you to whatever page you viewed after the one that you've just returned to. (If this is confusing, think of it as moving backwards and forwards through a slide show of all the pages that you've viewed -- except that it's not just a show, you're really on those pages.)
There is also a Home (or Start Page) button, which takes you back to whatever page the owner of the computer has set up as the "start page" -- the page that gets loaded automatically when you first start the browser. If you're using a public computer, this is probably a special page designed by the owners of the computer. By default, Microsoft's and Netscape's browsers are set up to start at those companies' respective home pages, and many people just leave it that way. If it's your computer, and you'd rather have your browser start on some other page, you can change it via the Options or Preferences menu option.
Finally, there is the Reload button, which is either a page with circling arrows on it or a downward-pointing arrow. This forces the browser to load a fresh copy of the current page, which can be useful if there's a transmission error or if your browser seems to be stuck halfway through the download of a page. Also, if you're visiting a site with frequently-updated data (such as weather or traffic information), you may have to hit the Reload button to get the most recent version of the page if you've already visited it earlier in the same browsing session.
Depending on how your browser is configured, the navigation buttons may be graphical icons, text labels, or both. You can control how they are displayed by ticking the appropriate boxes under View/Options/General (in Internet Explorer) or Edit/Preferences/Appearance (in Netscape).
Security: Interception of Web transactions is rare, but possible. Some sites offer "secure connections" (indicated by a closed-padlock or whole-key symbol in the status bar of your browser) which make data interception more difficult, but this is of course no guarantee that the person or company that runs the site is legitimate. Be very careful about sending credit card numbers or other personal information across the Web, especially while you're still getting a feel for what legitimate Web sites should look like.
Saving and Printing: Sometimes you may want to save a copy of a page to your hard drive (using the File/Save command) and/or print it (using File/Print or the Print button). This can be useful in certain circumstances, but you should avoid becoming too reliant on it; after all, the Web is a very special medium, and many of its unique advantages are lost if you try to turn it into a book. That said, there are some special cases where saving or printing may be the right way to go. Printing is appropriate when the page is not too graphics- or link-intensive and you want to read it at home or have a copy to refer to while you browse other pages online. If you have a computer at home but no Internet connection (or a slow one), you can also save pages to a floppy and load them in your browser at home using the File/Open command. Be aware, however, that you have to save each page individually, and many links and other special features may not work when you read pages offline.
Timesaving Keyboard Shortcuts: In both Internet Explorer and Navigator, F1 pulls up help on using the browser and holding down <alt> while you hit the left-arrow and right-arrow keys is the same as hitting the Back and Forward buttons.
If you want to practice with links, the Back button, and some of the other things mentioned above, click here for a special practice page.
If you want to look ahead to more detailed discussions of Web-related topics that will come up later in DI, here are a few links:
| Written by Ilya Farber | Copyright © 1998 Encylopaedia Britannica, Inc |
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This page was last edited: 08/17/04