Browsing the Web

"Surfing the 'Net" has become a part of the modern vernacular.  The Internet has become a virtual world onto itself, where people can communicate, buy and sell items, research information, or have fun.  In a sense, the Web is a virtual library that's always open, a store that never closes, and an ocean of useful information and plenty of junk as well.

The Internet is a network of networks connecting millions of computers throughout the world.  The World Wide Web (WWW), or Web for short, is a distributed hypertext networked information system where documents and links residing on different computers (Web servers) can appear to look as if they all came from a single and unified information system.

How the Web works? – a picture is worth a thousand words.

Web browsers
A program called a Web browser is needed to tap into the Web resources and view Web information. At UIC, the most commonly-used Web browser is Netscape Navigator. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Lynx are other Web browsers. As of Fall '99, more than 80% of UIC folks use Netscape Navigator.

URLs
Every Web document or resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL.  This is also commonly referred to as a "Web address" or "document address".

In its simplest form, the syntax of a URL is:

<protocol><host address><path>

where <protocol> is usually http://, <host address> is a fully qualified domain name of the Web server hosting the resource, e.g. www.uic.edu and <path> is the directory path to the actual Web resource or document.

For example, the URL for the ACCC home page is http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc where www.uic.edu indicates the Web server (namely, Tigger) and /depts/accc is the path to the ACCC home page stored on Tigger.

Instructing a Web browser to go to the above URL, results in the browser locating the Web page and downloading it for display on the screen.

For more information see or visit:

• Surfing the Web seminar materials
• Yahoo!, Snap, Search.com, Altavista, Excite, infoseek or c|net