The Internet and The World Wide Web.

The Internet and The World Wide Web.

Technology has really revolutionized the world in which we live today. First with the help of technology, computers were invented and then came the invention of the Internet and its component the World Wide Web. The Internet and the World Wide Web has an important significance in many people’s lives. It is also a favorite means of communications for millions of people just like me who log on the Internet and get connected every day. Due to an enormous popularity of the Internet, a lot of questions have raised, but the two most important questions relating the Internet are the functions of the Internet and how it works? and the safety on the Internet and how safe is it?

The word Internet came from the people of “The Federal Networking Council” (FNC). In their opinion the word “Internet” refers to the global information system that is logically linked together by a globally unique address space. The Internet began as the ARPANET during the cold war in 1969. It was developed by the US Department of Defense’s research people and a number of military contractors and universities to explore a communication network that cannot be destroyed if there was a nuclear strike.

The Internet was still very present after the cold war ended because the inventors of the Internet found that it was a very convenient way to communicate.

For the first decade that the Internet was in existence, it was only used between government agencies, companies and universities. During the early 1980’s, all the networks were converted to TCP/IP protocol and it was easily connected with ARPANET. In 1990, HTML, a hypertext Internet protocol which could communicate the graphic information on the Internet, was introduced. Now a person could create graphic pages called a Web Site, if he/she wanted. This later became part of a huge, virtual hypertext network called the World Wide Web. This enhanced Internet was informally renamed the Web and a huge additional audience was created.

At that time, most people use the term “Internet” to refer to the physical structure of the Net, which included client and server computers and the phone lines that connect everything. They use the term “Web” to refer to the collection of sites and the information that can be accessed when a person is using the Internet.

There are now many common Internet services that are available. The reason the most of these common Internet services were not available in the past was because the Internet was originally research-oriented , many of these services were poorly documented and were hard to use. As the Internet became more popular and more open for the general public and is opened to commercial and private sites, new services are being developed that is easier to use. There are a lot of Internet services that are now available, but the most common Internet services are:-

1. Informational Retrieval Services for example:- FTP and GOPHER.

2. Informational Search Services for example:- WAIS, Archie, Veronica.

3. Communication Services for example:- E-Mail, Telenet, UseNet, IRC.

4. Multimedia Information Services for example:- World Wide Web.

FTP(file transfer protocol) was one of the first developed Internet services that allowed users to move files from one place to another. This service is designed to enable you to connect to a computer on the Internet when using an FTP program and browse through the list of files that are available on your computer and after that retrieve the files if desired. FTP also lets a person download or upload and transfer any type of files-programs, text, pictures, sounds, or any other file format.

In order to connect to a computer system using an FTP program, the system must have an FTP server running on it. When a person connects to a machine using FTP, he/she must log in to an account on that machine. Some hosts let you download files without having an account, however, a person still needs to log in as a new user. Most FTP sites do not have a listing of all their available files. Sometimes the only way to locate a file or find interesting files is to click the folders to show the contents of the directories, and then look through them. If a person has a question or just want some information about an FTP server, he/she can do so via sending an e-mail message to the “postmaster” of the FTP machines.

Gopher is another information distribution service within the Internet. Sites on the Internet that distribute information through the Gopher system set up and run Gophers servers to enable people with Gopher clients to display and download files and directories. Gopher provides a menu-based interface to the resources available form the Gopher server, eliminating the need to enter commands to move between directories and retrieve files. Gopher is similar to FTP, but Gopher can connect you to other Internet services in addition to displaying and retrieving directories and files. Its is very easy to download or display a file using Gopher. All this plus the ability to put descriptive titles on the menu items, makes Gopher a much easier method of browsing files than using FTP to browse files. The Gopher workers run a Gopher official server that lists all the known Gopher servers and lets you connect to them.

WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) is a system that searches for your subject through documents on all servers all over the world. WAIS searches a set of databases that has been indexed with keywords, and returns addresses where you can locate documents that would be of interest to you. The WAIS system has the ability to have indexes that actually point to other WAIS servers. The heart of the WAIS system is the use of client software running on your local computers that lets you ask for information in simple, English-like language.

Archie was the first of the informational retrieval systems developed on the Internet. The purpose of Archie is to create a central index of files that are available on FTP sites around the Internet. In order to use Archie, you must either have an Archie client running on you local machine, or use Telenet to connect to one of the Archie servers and search the database there. When you have connected to one of the Archie database machines, you can search the data base for a program or file. Because the database only knows the name of files, a person must know at least part of the file name for which that person is looking. A person can also broaden his/her search by telling the Archie program that he/she want to do a “substring” search. This means to look for files that have that person’s search string anywhere in the file name even if it has different capitalization than the person’s original search sting.

Veronica is a service that searches menu items on Gopher servers. To use Veronica you have to be connected to a Gopher server that gives you access to a Veronica server. Because Gopher menu items can be more than just file names, it is easier to find the desired information through Veronica than it is through Archie. Veronica may find a file and an FTP site that Archie would not because a person can use Veronica to search for information on topics rather than just searching for file names. When Veronica is finished searching the Gopher server, it builds a Gopher menu that contains all of the items it has found to match that person’s search. A person can then examine those items by selecting them, just as you would from any Gopher menu.

The World Wide Web is one of the newest and the best client-server based Internet services that is available today. The idea of the world wide web was started in the 1980’s by CERN an European lab for Practice Physics which began experimenting with a service that would allow anyone to easily access and display documents that were stored on a server anywhere on the Internet. In order to achieve this, they developed a standard format for the documents that enabled them to be easily displayed by any type of display device, and allow links to other documents to be placed within documents.

Although the World Wide Web was developed for the CERN researchers to use, after the service was made public, it became an instant hit. A number of different client applications were developed to read World Wide Web documents. Most of them were graphical-based clients. A very good example of the graphical-based client is Netscape. Some of them were terminal-based clients that consisted of clients such as Lynx. Most of the Web clients also allow you to use the same interface to access other Internet services such as FTP and Gopher.

The web is simply defined as the universe of global network-accessible information. It is an abstract space where people can interact, and is currently heavily populated by interlinked pages of text, images and animations, with a little bit of sounds and videos. The commercial potential in the system has created new features that can help businesses.

The World Wide Web documents are ASCII documents that contain commands from a language called HTML, the web documents are not ASCII text documents though. HTML means hypertext markup language. HTML commands allow a person to tag passages of text. This tagging allows each of the web’s clients to format the text in a way that is appropriate for the display that the client is using, providing for effective use of text formatting. HTML also enables you to include in-line images. One of the main features of HTML is its ability to insert hypertext links into a document. Hypertext links enable a person to load another web document into another web client by simply clicking a link area on- screen. A document may contain links to many other related documents. The related documents may be on the same computer as the first document, or they may be on a computer halfway around the world. A link area may be a word or group of words. It can even be a picture.

Most of the World Wide Web clients allow a person to access other Internet services, such as FTP and Gopher. In addition, some Web clients display multimedia files such as movies and sounds through multimedia player programs that are mostly installed in the new computers.

The Web was designed to be a universal space of information, so when you make a bookmark or a hypertext link, you should be able to make that link to absolutely any piece of information that can be accessed using networks. When a person logs on to the web he is able to get linked to almost everything that the web has to offer.

The purpose to create a World Wide Web was to achieve a goal of working together. The idea was to build a hypertext web, which was designed as an instrument to prevent misunderstandings. In order to achieve this the web was created so a person can easily browse and explore the web. It was also created in a way that a person could gain knowledge and information and can also add any information that a person desires. The web was also created as a way of modern communication between people and sharing of the knowledge between people.

Another goal for the web to be successful was to be clear with its work and provide all the information and assistance that a person needs when he logs in and is surfing the web. This helps a person analyze and manage and have control of what he/she is trying to accomplish. The Web that is available to the general public now is seen by many as a glorified television channel. It keeps on improving to provide better

public information for the people. As the Web’s popularity grows more there are now more published books and magazines about the World Wide Web. For a group of people to use the web in practice, they need reliable access control, so that they know their ideas will only be seen by those who they trust.

There is also a limit to what a person can do by themselves with information, without the help of machines. There are a lot of new web users everyday who need help surfing the web, as the web has to offer so much. Most of the help is already available and a lot is on its way, which is being developed by the technical community and groups such as World-Wide Web Consortium.

The Consortium is a place for those companies for whom the Web is essential to promote and do business. There are currently 230 organizations in the Consortium. Whether developing software, hardware, networks, information for sale, or using the web as an important part of their business, these companies rely on current newly invented areas such as Web publishing, intranet use, electronic commerce, and Web-based education and training. From these fields the Consortium starts an activity to help reach computer protocols for that area. Protocols are the rules that allow computers to talk together about a given topic. When the industry agrees on protocols, then a new application can spread across the world, and new programs can all work together as they speak the same language. This is the key to the development of the Web.

Due to a very high demand of the World Wide Web among people, World Wide Web seems to be growing everyday. Logging on the web seems to be getting longer and slower. This is mainly caused because the servers cannot handle all the people logging at the same time. One reason for the slow response that a person can experience from a dial-up Internet account is caused by the vast majority of people trying to log on at the same time, which creates a real problem for the servers to maintain its regular speed and this mostly results in slow responses when logging on. If the companies make the servers faster, it will only result in more people trying to log on which will create more problems.

Another idea that is being experimented to make surfing the web a little faster is by subscription-based distribution of the Internet. If that ever happens it will be no different than using an E-mail or a newsgroup. The user must also decide whether to use mailing lists, newsgroups, or the Web to publish something. It all depends on the demand that people with the web page have.

There is a common format for expressing information about information. It is called metadata. The fields that need the services of metadata includes privacy information, endorsement labels, library catalogues, tools for structuring and organizing web data and distribution terms. In order to allow data from all these fields to be written in the same form, and carried together and mixed, the Consortium’s Resource Description Framework (RDF) is designed.

In cases where a high level of trust is needed for metadata, digitally signed metadata will allow the web to include a ‘Web of trust’. The Web of trust will be a set of documents on the web that are digitally signed with certain keys, and contain statements about those keys and other documents. Unlike the web, the Web of trust does not need to have a specific structure like a tree or a matrix. Like the Web of trust hypertext was also suitable for a global information system because it has the same flexibility like the Web of trust which was the power to represent any structure of the real world or a created imagined one.

The Web was thought to be a shared information space through with people and their machines can communicate with each other. It turned out to be very bigger than that. When the creators of the world wide web were creating such a massive communication and information site, it was based on ideas such as an information system must be able to record random associations between any objects, unlike most database systems and if two users started to use the system by themselves, it should be very easy for them to make a link form one system to another.

One of the key points of the World Wide Web was the network felxibilities between well known networks of software designs. Most of the things in the web were to be specified as possible and those specifications that had to be made should be independent. This independence of specifications would allow parts of the design to be replaced while preserving the basic architecture. A test was done which was to replace new specifications with the older ones, and demonstrate the ability to intermix those with the new. That led to the mixing of the old FTP protocol with the new HTTP protocol in the address space, and also led to the mixing of conventional text documents with the new hypertext documents.

The concept of hypertext has been around for a long time. Hypertext systems were built around a database of links. This guaranteed that links would be consistent, and links to documents would be removed when documents were removed. The removal of this feature was the principle compromise made in the W3 architecture, which allowed references to be made without consultation with the destination. The power of a link in the web is that it can point to any document of any kind of information. In order to accomplish this it requires a global space of identifiers. These identifiers are the primary element of web architecture. The structure starts with a prefix such as “http:” to indicate into which case the rest of the sting will point. In the URI space, any space of any kind, which has some kind of identifying, naming or addressing syntax can be mapped into printable syntax and can be given a prefix. It can later become part of URI space. The properties of any URI space depends on the properties of the space into which it points. Depending on these properties, some spaces tend to be known as “name” spaces, and some as “address” space, but the actual properties of any given URI depends not only on its definition, syntax and support protocols, but also on the social structure supporting it and defining the allocation and reallocation of identifiers. The web architecture does not depend on the decision as to whether URI is a name or an address, although the phrase URL was coined in IETF circles to indicate that most URIs actually in use were considered more like addresses than names. An important principle is that URIs are generally treated as opaque strings. Client software is not allowed to look inside them and to draw conclusions about the object or objects found.

Another interesting feature of URIs Is that they identify documents in different ways. For example one URI can be given a book which is available in several languages and several data formats. Another URI could be given for the same book in specific language, and another URI could be given for a bitstream representing a specific edition of the book in a given language and data format. This shows that the concept of identity of a web object allow and identify object in different ways, which is very unusual in object-oriented systems.

A standard protocol still existed in the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) when all the protocols went for accessing remote data. However this was not suited for the web. It was too slow and not sufficiently rich in features, so a new protocol was designed to operate with the speed necessary for hypertext links. It was called HTTP, HyperText Transfer Protocol. The HTTP URIs were resolved into the addressed document by splitting each other into two halves. The first half is applied to the Domain Name Service whose purpose is to discover a suitable server, and the second half is an opaque string which is handed to that server.

A feature of HTTP is that it allows a client to specify preferences in terms of language and data format. This allows a server to select a suitable specific object when the URI is requested. This feature is found and used in many different HTTP servers but it tends to be underutilized by clients, partly because of the time overhead in transmitting the preferences, and partly because URIs have always been the exception. This feature is known as format negotiation, and is one key element of difference between the HTTP specification and the HTML specification.

HyperText MarkUP Language was introduced as the data format to be transmitted over the write. It was supposed to be the interchange of hypertext. HTML was chosen to resemble some SGML based systems in order to encourage its acceptance by the documentation community, among whom SGML was a preferred syntax, and the hypertext community, among whom SGML was the only syntax considered as a possible standard. SGML made the communities to accept the web more easily and it turned out to have very complex and not very well defined syntax. The experts still cannot find any relationships between SGML and HTML that can revolutionize the web.

When the World Wide Web was first introduced, it did not attract immediate attraction and had a very small amount of people using this service. The Initial prototype of the web was written in NEXTStep from October till December 1990. This allowed the simple addition of new links and documents that browsed at the same time. The initial web describing the web was written using this tool. It also linked sound and graphic files, and was published by a simple HTTP server. A “line-mode” browser was written by Nicola Pellow to ensure global acceptance of the web. “Line-mode” is a very portable hypertext browser which allows web information to be retrieved on any platform. This was the only thing that the people saw in the web in its beginning stages.

A second server was written which provided a gateway into the phonebook database on a mainframe at CERN. This was the first useful web application. This gateway server was followed by a number of others, making a web client a useful tool. After CERN was getting useless as no further resources were being available for it, the Internet community turned to port the World Wide Web programs to other platforms. Erwise, Midas, Viola-WWW for X windows and Cello for windows™ were various clients introduced. All of these clients were only browsers. Viola-WWW, by Pei Wei, was based on mobile code language that was Viola, and was also compared to what we now know as Hot Java™.

The Internet Gopher was seen for a long time as an information system that avoided the complexities of HTML. This takes development to the point where the general users of the World Wide Web became aware of it. HTML was intended to be a server client filled with rich and varied data types. This resulted in the web starting to drive it, rather than relying on the extent of computer availability and Internet connectivity. The URL syntax of the “http:” type became well known to the public as the 800 numbers of the computer and its Internet.

The common standards of URIs, HTTP and HTML have allowed growth of the web, and have also allowed the development resources of companies and universities across the world to be applied to the services of the web. This has resulted in a rapid growth of new data types and protocols. The ability of HTTP to handle arbitary data formats has allowed expansion, of the introduction of three-dimension scene description language. It has been very easy for the mobile program code, to transfer byte code format. The hardest part of all this has been for servers to know what clients have supported, as the format negotiation system. This has led to the engineering practice in the servers, which checks the browser make and version against a table kept by a server. This makes it difficult to introduce new clients, and is very difficult to maintain. It has also led to the “spoofing” of well-known clients by new less well-known ones in order to extract rich data for the servers. This has accompanied by an insufficiency in the MIME types used to describe data, text/html is used to refer to many levels of HTML, image/png is used to refer to any PNG format graphics and Java™ files are shipped around without any visible indication of the runtime support that they require to execute.

Since recently there is a worry that a fragmentation of the web standards would eventually destroy the universe of information upon which so many developments, technical and commercial information were being built. This resulted in a formation of a group called the World Wide Web Consortium. The Consortium consists of 150 members including all the major developers of web technology, and many other businessmen whose businesses rely heavily upon the web. Based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and at the Institute Nationale pour la Recherche en Informatique et Automatique in Europe, the Consortium provides a vendor-neutral forum where competing companies can meet to agree on common specifications to make the web better. The Consortium’s sole mission is to realize the full potential of web, and the directions in which it is shown and described later on.

The developments of web protocols are driven mostly by technical needs of infrastructure. It is also sometimes driven by particular applications and by the connection between the web and the society that can be built around it. For example there were worries shown by the parents, schools, and governments that young children would gain access to material which can be harmful to them such as indecency, violence etc. Fearing a threat of governments restrictions of the Internet use, or worse, the community reacted in the form of W3C’s Platform for Internet Content Selection also known as (PICS). PICS introduces new protocol elements and data formats to the web architecture, and is also interesting because principles involved may apply to future developments.

Very importantly, PICS allows parents to set up filters for their children’s information that the children take in. This allow parents to decide what is right and what is wrong for their child when that child is surfing the web. Technically, PICS involves a specification for a machine readable label. Unlike HTML, PICS labels are designed to be read by machine, and the filter software. They are in sets of pairs, and are self describing meaning that any label carrying a URL provides both machine-readable and human-readable explanations.

PICS labels may be obtained in a number of way. They may be transported on CD-ROM, or they may be sent by a server along with the labelled data. The labels may be digitally signed, so that their authenticity can be verified by their method of delivery. They may also be obtained in real time from a third party. This requires a specification for a protocol for party A to ask party B for any labels which refers to information originated by party C.

The Web allows the exchange of information and also the interchange of money. Exchanging cash is impossible digitally, but many schemes provide assurances and promises to pay allowing checkbook, credit card, and a host of new forms of payment schemes. Although people have started dealing cash over the World Wide Web, the idea of dealing cash over the web is not a new idea. The current situation is that a number of proposals still exist for specific protocols to make the security tighter and better and the payments easier. One protocol, Netscape’s “Secure Socket Layer”, is the most used protocol in need of a little change.

The principle machine analysis of material on the web has been made possible by search engines. Search engines have proven very useful when searching for large indexes which can be searched very rapidly. Some new ideas to make search engines more reliable and useful involve analysis not only of the web, but also of people’s interests with the web. Some of these new programs have been described as “agents”, as they act on behalf of the user. There is currently little generally developed use of mobile agents. Mobile codes are used to create interesting human interfaces for data, and to inform the user and most of the time connect the user to any new distributed application. Mobile codes has a much greater impact on the software architecture of software on client and server machines. However, without a web of trust to allow mobile programs to act on a user’s behalf, progress will be very limited.

When the web was first designed, the idea that a person could start a server that can perform forever without giving any trouble to the user and without regard of registration with any central authority or with the numbers of other HTTP servers which others might be running was considered very important in further developments of servers. Today the numbers of clients is so great that the need is for a server to be able to operate with as many clients as possible. Sometimes the documents are so vast and detailed that the load on servers becomes quite impossible and unacceptable.

More businesses are relying on the web now than ever before. Because of so many new businesses entering the World Wide Web every single day, the servers and networks can no longer handle all these clients. Since the business on the web is increasing, it is resulting in creating more problems for the web such as categorizing documents and users, anticipating high usage of groups of documents by group of users, deciding on where to place copies of data for rapid access and how to find a the neatest and cheapest copy when given an URL. In order to beat these problems, designers are increasing the efficiency of HTTP communication, especially for the users who use a telephone modem.

At W3C and elsewhere, the work on improving the web as a communication medium has mainly revolved around the data formats for various displayable documents types such as continued extensions to HTML, the new Portable Network Graphics (PNG) specification and the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML). There will always be new formats coming along in the future, and it may be more powerful and consistent than what we have seen and might one day displace HTML.

For the future, the web designers are trying to improve the web to make it faster and better. The intention for the future is that the web should be used as a personal information system. It should also be used as a group tool for everybody. An important power to look for in the future is the ability to move and link information between layers of the web, and helping maintain consistency when the layers are blurred.

The most famous aspect of the web is the corporate site, which addresses the general consumer population on the web. The power of the web within organization is really being appreciated now and will increase in the future. When the web was first started, there were only few hundred public servers in existence and only one large computer company had over a hundred internal servers. To set up a private server now

requires access control only, and almost anybody can do it.

The web designers are also looking to improve in the areas such as better editors to allow direct interaction with web data, notification to those interested when information changes, integration of audio and video internet conferencing technologies, hypertext links that represents in a visible way, third party annotation servers, allowing group membership to be established for access control, and the representation of links as first class objects with version control.

The web in the future will be naturally useable as a personal information system. For right now this is not possible as the global data and personal data cannot be handled in a consistent way. This means that that the basic computer interface which typically uses a desktop must be integrated with hypertext. File systems also have links just like the web documents making not that big of a difference between them. In the future useful information management objects such as folders will also need to be transferable in standard ways in order to exist on the web. The importance of filenames will also decrease in the future. The results that the web designers are hoping for is the web universe to be consistent and informational.

There is a connection between developments in machines processing of global data and in cryptographic security. For machine reasoning over a global domain to be effective, machines must be able to verify the authenticity of assertion found on the web. This requires a global security infrastructure allowing signed documents. Similarly, a global security infrastructure seems to need the ability to be included in the information about cryptographic keys and trust. Since the government does not allow the use of cryptography, either kind of systems is not available yet, although the PICS system may be a first step in the direction of making both kinds of systems as its labels are machine readable.

At the first International Wold Wide Web Conference in Geneva in May 1994, the main focus point was on the engineers as the field that they mostly take are academic or technical fields, but many ethical and social issues are also addressed by the kinds of protocols that they design. Since then such issues have increased. A very good example is the PICS initiative that showed that the form of network protocols can affect the form of a society that one builds within the information space.

Now a days anyone who uses the world wide web have concerns over privacy issues. One of the most important issues today is about “cookies”. Many organizations use “cookies to track the users every move on their site. A cookie is a unique identifier that a web server places on your computer. There is also a serial number that can be used to retrieve user records from their databases. They are kept in a file called cookies.txt in your browser or directory or folder. Some of them can last for years and they are called persistent cookies. When the user looks into his/her cookies file, most of the time there are sites that are just stored for advertisement purposes by the sites that the users have visited. Once a users identity becomes known to a single company listed in that users cookie file, any of the other companies can also know who the person is every time that users visits their sites. I do not recommend cookies in this type of day and age because a user cannot trust anyone on the world wide web as they can sell and take advantage of a users name that they got from the cookie files. I also suggest that an Internet user should disable cookies and its files.

There are also other programs such as ActiveX, VBS, Java and Javascript that should be disabled to because of the large numbers of serious security loopholes that have opened, and also because it is another way for the servers to get information about a user. The user should also make sure to never give his e-mail address or any private information out over the Internet, as it can also lead to disaster. In order to check if the user’s e-mail address is being given out, he/she should visit any of the FTP sites that displays the login name given by that user’s browser.

One thing is certain. The web will have a profound effect on the businesses and the cultures around the world in the near future. A lot will also be depended on the people doing the business over the Internet as they will either make or break their businesses. The technologies in the future will also play a big part when accessing the web. One thing is for sure, with the help of the World Wide Web the world can get closer or get far apart. It is all depends on us the people using the World Wide Web.

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