Laserfiche WebLink
<br />- <br /> <br />-- <br /> <br />.. <br /> <br />iefGH \17\1' f;; 1/-;2.- <br /> <br />The World Wide Web <br /> <br />The World Wide Web is the most important invention since Velcro. <br />Business Week (February 27, 1995) <br /> <br />The beginnings of the World Wide Web ean be traced from 1945 on through to the 1980's when <br />work really began on defining and developing the programs. In the late 1980's and early 1990's <br />work on the World Wide Web was centered at the CERN High Energy Pal1icle Aecelerator <br />facility in Switzerland. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web with the purpose of <br />allowing scientists and others to share papers, documents, and research among themselves, <br />regardless of where in the world those items existed. In short, the World Wide Web is a global <br />information storage and retrieval system. <br /> <br />In the fall of 1992, Marc Andreesen at the University ofIllinois conceived Mosaic, a graphical <br />user interface to the Web. In 1993, he developed Mosaie along with a team at the National <br />Center for Supercomputer Applications in Champaign, Illinois. Other graphical web browsers <br />followed, including the Netscape Navigator, Cello and Microsoft's Internet Explorer. These web <br />browsers are used by a person to locate and display the information retrieved from a World Wide <br />Web server. Inherent to the nature of the WWW is the concept of hypertext and hyperlinks. <br />Hyperlinks allow documents to be tied together based upon contextual links which can be easily <br />followed by someone reading a document. These hyperlinks connecting information and <br />documents stored on computer systems around the world is what makes the World Wide Web. <br /> <br />Used correetly, hypertext and hyperlinks can make for a natural flow from one document to <br />another and allows a reader to navigate the information at a level at which they are comfortable. <br />Someone reading a document in their field of expertise may read past links to documents <br />containing background, historical, and definitional information. Someone reading the same <br />document, but without the firm grounding in the subject, would probably take side trips to these <br />background documents to get additional information and definitions oftenninology. <br /> <br />In addition to hyperlinks, the inclusion of inline images is what made the World Wide Web really <br />take off. Other infonnation storage systems available at the time, such as Gopher, developed at <br />the University of Minnesota, did not include inline images and their popularity quickly faded in <br />deference to that of the World Wide Web. Since the inclusion ofthe graphical image format <br />(GIF) images, other image formats have been added to the web browser feature list so that now <br />many kinds of still digital pictures can be viewed easily. In addition, animation and moving <br />pictures with audio traeks ean be embedded in a web page. These images can be canned movies, <br />or they ean be videos of live events, happening anywhere in the world. <br /> <br />Search engines are web sites that help web surfers quickly find and retrieve the information they <br />are looking for. Different search engines are geared toward different segments of the WWW, <br />with some concentrating on scientific and technical subjeets, while others focus on entertainment <br />