What appears on a browser screen or "window"?
How do I move from page to page?
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Welcome to the World Wide Web! Once you've accessed the Internet via an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you can reach a multitude of interconnected information sites on the Web. Companies, organizations, governments, and individuals design and maintain these sites, and the number of sites increases daily.
A browser is simply the software that lets you see Web sites and navigate between different sites. Think of your browser as your window on the Web. Netscape Communicator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and America OnLine are browsers, as are any other programs that let you see both the print and graphic elements of the Web on your computer screen.
Although this site was created using Netscape Communicator, and you are probably viewing this site in a lab using a version of Netscape, everything that you will learn in this unit applies to all browsers, including America OnLine.
Home is the place you start when you "launch" (start up) your browser. Once you've connected to the Web, whatever screen your browser displays first will be "home" for you. And whenever you click on the "home" button (an icon of a house, at the top of the screen), you will come back to your starting place.
Note that home is not the same as a "home page," which many Web users decide to create for themselves.
Each browser is set up differently. The description that follows assumes you are using Netscape, but all recent browser software includes the same basic components. Netscape's features are listed below in order from the top of the screen to the bottom.
The very first thing you see is a narrow bar with some writing on it. For example, if you look at the very top of your screen right now, you will see the words http://www.udel.edu/udparallel/newskillmod/unit1_1.html. This is the title of the page you are looking at. Search engines, which we will discuss in another unit, depend on these titles when they are searching for keywords.
The next narrow bar is the menu bar. You may be familiar with menu bars from other software applications, like Windows or the Macintosh/Apple Operating System. These menus help you manage your browser, and we will discuss them in more detail later.
The next bar is much wider, and has icons (small symbolic pictures) on it. Generally, you should see the following:
- An arrow pointing to the left: Clicking on this arrow with your mouse will move you back one page if you have moved from "home."
- An arrow pointing to the right: Clicking on this arrow will move you forward one page if there is a page to move forward to. This arrow usually works only if you have been using the Back button already.
- A house: This stands for "home." Clicking on it will take you back to where you started.
- An arrow pointing down or in a circle: This is the "reload" button. It will ask the browser to re-contact the server that stores the page you are looking at and update any changes to the page since the last time you looked at it.
- A printer icon: This button will generally print the current page (which may turn out to be several actual paper pages in length), using the standard printer settings.
- A stop sign or stoplight: Clicking on this button will tell your browser to stop loading a page that is taking too long, or to stop waiting for an answer from a remote server (host machine) that obviously isn't responding, or just in general make the browser stop doing whatever it was doing. Sometimes when you click "Stop," you will get a partial page (whatever loaded before you clicked on Stop), and other times, you will get nothing and just return to the page you were on.
On most browsers, the next bar is the location bar. This is where you type web site addresses so you can move to a new site. A web site address is called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator), and it begins with "http://. . .".
Most of the screen below the location bar is taken up by the Web page with the corresponding URL.
The narrow bar at the bottom of the window is called the status bar. When you type a URL in the location bar and hit enter, the status bar tells you when your browser has contacted the remote server, when the server has responded, how much of the page you are accessing is left to load, and sometimes a time frame, in seconds, of how long it will be before the page is loaded.
Practice recognizing links by moving your cursor over the text below. How many links are there?
enables
students throughout Delaware to begin their college experience in small
classes in a supportive environment. On the *largest
Parallel campus*, enrollment is around four-hundred students per semester,
and the largest class in the program enrolls only fifty-five to sixty students.
Parallel students are full citizens of the University.
That's pretty much all there is to web pages: text and links, with images.
Notice how once you've clicked on a link, the link changes color. The color change simply reminds you that you have already tried that particular link. The link itself remains functional.
Another way to get to a site is to type its URL in the bar near the top of the window labeled "location" or "Netsite." At the moment, the URL of the page you are on is there. To type in a new URL, click anywhere in that space. The current address will become highlighted. Now you can type in the new address, and then hit return/enter to tell the browser to load the new page.
Listed below are three Web site URLs:
http://owl.english.purdue.edu
http://www.ipl.org
http://www.clearinghouse.net
http://www.loc.gov
http://www.ul.cs.cmu.edu
Look up these five sites on the Web and then, using PINE, e-mail a brief description of each to your instructor. Your description should answer the following questions: What is the title or name of the site? Who authors or sponsors the site (author/sponsor information often appears at the bottom of the opening page)? What kind of information appears in the site? What form does it take (text, graphics, links, or all three?)?
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