Glossary

Archie

An Internet service that searches FTP sites for software and files.

Browser

A client software that provides an interface to the World Wide Web. Examples are Mosaic, Netscape, Lynx, Charlotte (i.e. WWW on UICVM) and HotJava.

CERN

A high-energy particle physics lab, in Geneva, where the World Wide Web was developed.

CGI -- Common Gateway Interface.

A protocol used to exchange information between an interactive Web page (a.k.a. form) and a custom program running on the Web server.

Client

A computer or program that requests a service from another computer or program.

Hypertext

A hypertext document consists of non-linear text with links to other text or documents. One navigates through hypertext by following the active links in the text.

Hypermedia

A hypermedia document may contain text, graphics, photography, animation, sound, music and video, interrelated, in a non-sequential fashion, via hypertext links (a.k.a. hyperlinks). World Wide Web publications are commonly referred to as hypermedia.

Uniform Resource Locators

URLs are used to specify the exact location of Internet resources on the WWW. A URL includes the protocol to use when accessing the server, the host address (or name) of the server and the hierarchical path to the resource. The syntax is:

protocol://host.domain.name[port]/path/filename

where protocol can be one of:

http -- for a file on a WWW server; e.g. http://www.uic.edu/index.html or http://www.uic.edu/~your-name/

ftp -- for a file on an FTP server; e.g. ftp://ftp.uic.edu/pub/nskit/dos_win/netsinst.zip

file -- for a file on the local computer; e.g. file:///homes/home1/garay/public_html/glossary.html

gopher -- for a file on a Gopher server; e.g. gopher://gopher.uic.edu/

wais -- for a search in a WAIS server; e.g. wais://wais.server.edu/database?search

news -- to read Usenet (i.e. Netnews) newsgroups; e.g. news:comp.infosystems.www.users or news:uic.general

mailto -- to send mail to somebody; e.g. mailto:garay@uic.edu

telnet -- to open a telnet connection; e.g. telnet://tigger.uic.edu or tn3270://uicvm.uic.edu

For more information on URLs, see:

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/url-primer.html http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/URL/Overview.html http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Addressing/Addressing.html

WWW -- World Wide Web.

A wide-area hypermedia information retrieval network.

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