Topics in Using the Internet Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer and the World Wide Web (WWW) Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers are graphical user interface to the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web (or more simply the Web, WWW or W3) searches and browses the whole Internet via hyperlinks embedded in documents and Web site home pages (top-level documents). "Hyperlinks" are hot links that operate like buttons, leaping you to related documents somewhere on the Web. Netscape and Internet Explorer bring a point-and-click graphical ease to the Web. In their image-rich environment, just click on the blue-colored hyperlinks and glide across the Internet. Within Internet you will find resources in all formats including text, image and sound. The street address of bits of information on the Internet is represented by URLs. URL is the abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator, the addressing system used in the World Wide Web and other Internet resources. Effectively, URL is a pointer to each unit of data on the Web. A URL is a string of characters containing information about domain name (host name), method of access, and any directory and file to be accessed. The general format of a URL is: <Protocol>://<domain name>:<port >/<directory >/<file name> Port number is not always present in an URL. For example in: http://www.cuyamaca.net/library/general_information.htm http is the protocol, www.cuyamaca.net is the domain (host) name, library is the directory and general_information.htm is the file name. Domain which stands for the site is a hierarchy of sub-domains. Each sub-domain specifies an item. The left-most sub-domain usually refers to the computer or unit name (the server). The second sub-domain usually refers to the organization name, (Cuyamaca College, in the above URL), and the right-most sub-domain in the above URL, net, specifies the type of the organization. The common organizational domains are:
In some domain name, there is a sub-domain that specifies the geographical location. For example in the domain name: mail.gcccd.cc.ca.us:
URL Types
To start surfing on the Internet at Cuyamaca College:
The first thing to appear on your monitor is the Cuyamaca College page, which is the home page. Click on various buttons to see other pages of this site. Whenever you put your mouse pointer on a colored, underscored text, icon or picture and a white hand appears, you are on a hot link which means by clicking on that object you will be taken either to a page within the site or to other locations on the Web. A useful feature of the college's home page site is the library page. There you'll be able to access the on-line catalogues of our library and those of the libraries of Grossmont College and San Diego State University. To search a piece of information for which you don't have its URL: Click on the Search button on the toolbar of the browser. A page will appear with a number of search engines available for your selection. These search engines serve as indexes to the Web. Some of the most common are AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, etc. To search a piece of information for which you have its URL:
It is a good idea to watch the status bar at the bottom of the screen when you have clicked on a hyperlink or launch button or when you have entered a new URL and waiting for connection. It lets you know the changing status of the connection and downloading.
Main Icons of the Toolbars on Commonly Used Browsers Back returns you to the previous page. Forward returns you to the page you went back from. Reload (Netscape) reloads the current document. Refresh (Internet Explorer) reloads the current document. Home takes you to the default home page. Print sends the current page to the default printer.
Stop ends the loading process for the current document. Both browsers also offer pop-up menus of right mouse- button tools appearing pop. The menus are not uniform for both browsers. Home Page Home page is the Web document that you tells the browser to display when it starts. A home page gives you access to the WWW sites or documents that you use most. To quickly access your favorite sites and also to be able to return to the same page after a system crash of any type, it is recommended to setup bookmark file in Netscape and Favorites file in Internet Explorer. To add new URL to your bookmark or Favorites, once you are at site, depending on the browser, open the respective file, and click Add. Bookmark and Favorites makes your search very efficient, if you update them with the URLs of the sites that you visit. If you have searched before and placed a bookmark, to get to the same URL, Click on Bookmarks or Favorites button, click the required URL, and this leaps you automatically to that site or resource. It is recommended to preview the document by selecting Print Preview from File menu. This is a very useful procedure because Web based documents are usually very long and you may not need the entire document. Furthermore, documents may also contain images that might be of no interest to you. The best way to print documents from Web is through copy and paste. In this way your document would not contain the unwanted images and you can also edit the document, before printing. You may find that some Web documents while readable on screen, are blank when previewing. In such situation, click somewhere on the body of document and preview again Copy and Paste a Web document
If you would like to save an image or music (not possible with every music format, some music formats have to be downloaded) from the Internet, follow the following procedure: PC Platform:
Another dialog box appears asking you where to save the file. Locate the proper drive and directory, change the file name if you want to, and then click Save. Make sure you know what drive you saved the picture to for future reference. Do not change the default file extension, i.e., jpg or gif, for images and au or mid, for music. Remember image and music file sizes are much larger than word processing documents and you have a limited storage area (5 MB) on the network. Copy the saved images and music to floppy disks and free up your space in the network. Macintosh Platform:
Another dialog box appears asking you where to save the file. Locate the proper drive and directory, change the file name if you want to, and then click Save. Do not change the default file extension, i.e., jpg or gif, for images and au or mid, for music. Remember image and music file sizes are much larger than word processing documents and you have a limited storage area on the students temporary folder on the desktop, which is public and open to everybody. Copy the saved images and music to floppy disks and free up your space in the network. Student's E-Mail Account @ Cuyamaca College Internet e-mail (short for electronic mail) allows you to exchange messages with anyone else on the Internet. The person to whom you send e-mail may be next door or on the other side of the world. It is easy to compose and send e-mail. You can attach text, music and/or graphics files to your messages. E-mail's transmission across the Internet is extremely fast and it is inexpensive. For each semester that you register at college, for any subject and any number of
units, an e-mail account that could be accessed from anywhere in the world, will be
set up for you. Your college e-mail address is User Name@students.gcccd.net.
Example: College e-mail address for John Richardson is: johnrichardson@students.gcccd.net College e-mail address for Linda Smith is: lindasmith@students.gcccd.net To access you college e-mail account:
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