Introduction to the World Wide Web

What is the World Wide Web?

Welcome to the World Wide Web (WWW) at Lancaster University. The Web is a collection of pages of information (like this one) connected by links. A group of pages on the same computer is sometimes called a Web site. A link is usually distinguished from other parts of a page - although the exact method may vary.

This sentence is a link. This is a normal sentence.

Important points about the WWW are that it is:

very big - and growing extremely quickly.
very variable - Web pages are produced by Universities, Governments, Companies, Charities and Individuals. Some good, some bad.
a multimedia system - Web pages can contain text, pictures, sounds, video clips - anything that can be stored on a computer.
user-driven - you are in control, you decide which link you want to follow.

The computer program you are using to look at this page on the Web is called a browser, probably Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. Browsers often only show part of a page - you may have to use the scroll bar to see the rest.

When you follow a link to another page you build a history list of previously visited pages. You can move BACK and FORWARDS through this history list using the buttons or menu options. Your browser keeps a record of where you've been (look at the Go menu in Netscape or the History option in Explorer). If you get lost you can always select HOME and go back to the start.

The World in the World Wide Web means that a page can be on a computer anywhere that's connected to your computer. Pages are identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) - the URL of the current page is probably shown by your browser at the top.

The URL of this page is:
http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ariadne/ihe/web/intro.html

The next section is: Example Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)

Help Index | Lancaster University

Produced by the IHE Project Support for Learning Information Searching Skills.

Comments and suggestions to dmn@comp.lancs.ac.uk
Last revision: 4th October 1998