Joy of Access: The Web

The World Wide Web—you may know it as “Netscape”, but you’re wrong—is the flashy part of the net. It’s not just text anymore. You’ve got pictures, and, if the site you’re going to is particularly progressive, you might see animation and hear sound.

If you want to see the web in all its glory, you’ll need to use a graphical web browser. “Explorer” and “Netscape” are the two most common web browsers.

If you know the URL of a place you want to see, you can tell your web browser. Under graphical web browsers, there is usually an “Open Location…” item underneath the “File” menu. Choose this and type the URL you want.

The web is made up of “pages” and “links”. A web “page” is a document on the web. A web page could be one line long, or a hundred, or more.

“Links” link web pages together, and they can also link web pages to other Internet services. A link is basically just a URL. In a graphical web browser, some words are highlighted, usually in red or blue. If you click on these highlighted words with the mouse, the web browser goes out and gets the page or service that the URL points to. A blue link is a link that your browser thinks you haven’t seen yet, and a red link is one that you have seen.

Graphics are often linked as well, and some of them won’t have blue or red highlights. It can’t hurt to click on it. Well, it might be linked to www.fantasysex.com, and if your boss is looking, that could hurt.