Internet and E-mail (English) 04

An Internet Service Provider

Apart from the equipment, an essential part of the mix is to sign up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP). In fact, without one, you'll be left on the starting blocks. ISPs are organizations like telephone companies that connect you with the Internet. Some charge a monthly fee and some are free. Popular ones include Lanka Internet, Eureka on-line and SLT. In short, an ISP account lets you reach out to the whole web - for the price of a local call.

You'll find it seems like an infinite sea, so luckily there are handy programs called browsers to help you navigate. Your browser will be supplied by your ISP and will be completely free. The two main ones are Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. Basically, they work seamlessly with your own operating system to make the surfing experience easier - and more fun. Sticking with the browser your ISP supplies is a good bet as they can give you technical support if you have any problems.

World Wide Web

The father of www (World Wide Web) - Tim Berners - Lee

Tim BL was the driving force behind the development of the WWW. He wrote the first WWW Client and the first WWW server and defined standards such as URL, HTML, and HTTP applications.

Prior to that, he was a founding director of Image Computer Systems and a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, England. He has graduated from Oxford University. Tim has a wife and two children.

Hyper text markup language - HTML

HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language, the language that describes how a page should be formatted.

All WWW pages are written in HTML. While some files may have different file extension (such as .cfm or .asp), their core is still HTML.

HTML is no real language such as C++ or Pascal; it is just a system fro describing documents. A WWW browser interprets the HTML - code and display it.

HTML is a special version of SGML (is used by big companies for exchange of data) focused on Hypertext. HTML code is written in ASCII - format. This is a big advantage; because ASCII can be read by about any platform (IBM, Macintosh, UNIX...) thus making the WWW usable for any platform as long as viewer programs, the browsers, exist.

Web Page – A file that contains text, images, etc. and the links to the other pages, sites, etc.

Browsers

What are browsers? Browsers are programs for displaying HTML-code. They are used for "browsing" the WWW.

History the first browsers, Viola and Midas, were released in January 1993 for the X - Window system (UNIX). At the same time, a Macintosh browser was released as an ALPHA - version.

WWW, a line mode browser, was available for the public on 15th January 1992 via telnet. The first popular browser was NCSA Mosaic. It supported only HTML 1.0. (First ALPHA - version was released in February 1993 [Mosaic for X]). It was released for all common platforms (X, PC/Windows, and Macintosh) in September 1993.

Web Browser – The piece of software that pulls the requested page from the Web Server and it interprets the HTML code and displays the page on the client computer.

URLs “Internet Address”

Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the Internet address of the web page requested.