Introduction to the Internet

What is the WWW (World Wide Web)?

The World Wide Web is a collection of documents stored across the Internet and hyperlinked together. Like Gopher, the Web integrates various Internet services into a consistent interface. Such services are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URL's), and include E-Mail, Network News, FTP, Telnet, Gopher, and other Web documents. Documents are composed of styled text with embedded images, sounds, and animations.

Attributes

Software

Example

This is a screen image of NCSA Mosaic for the Macintosh:

Other Notes

The Web is still developing and growing, but is also highly unstructured. Documents are not linked regularly to others, and many collections may be information rich but contain rather specific or too general documents. In fact, there are few organized methods for searching the Web for particular topics, and most of your time is spent navigating and browsing for useful documents.

Getting More Information

To find out more about the Web and HTML, check out the following links:
This document was created at the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies (SILS), but it has been designed for public use. Permission is hereby granted for unlimited print and electronic redistribution. Your feedback is encouraged.

fprefect@umich.edu - 2/26/95