How to use the Internet in work with young people

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (or Web for short) is a collection of millions of documents that are held on the computers that form the Internet. These are not word processing documents, although in many cases they might appear to be. Web documents (actually computer files) can hold text, colours, graphics, photographs, moving images (video clips) and sounds of all kinds. The Web is multimedia although a good deal of it is just text. A web site is a collection of pages that work together - Blaby on the Net, for example, currently has over 100 pages (or html files) (http://www.blaby.net)

Each web page has the ability to contain hypertext links. When these are selected (e.g. with a mouse pointer) a link can be created to another web page - which might be on the same computer as the original page or it might be on a computer on the other side of the world. When that link is activated, the computer screen displays the new document. A hypertext link can be set in a piece of text - in which case the text is underlined and normally is displayed in another colour - or the link can be set into an image.

In order to view a web page we need to use a piece of computer software called a web browser. Whilst there are many brands of browser, two dominate the market: Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape's Navigator. These products allow users to locate the web page on the Internet and to see it. If our computer has a sound card we can also hear any sounds associated with it and if we have a video card installed, then we can see video clips too.

Each web page has a URL - Uniform Resource Locator - that identifies the computer which holds the page and its file name. URLs always begin with the code http:// - although this can sometimes be left out when typing the URL into a browser. Most URLs also include the letters WWW - though not all. The rest of the URL specifies which computer holds the page and which file is to be accessed. So, if we want to see Blaby on the Net web site we will need to type: http://www.blaby.co.uk - that then takes us into the Blaby web site which is held on a computer in Loughborough. We could go directly into the Site Shop (a page with the file name shop.htm) in which case we would type http://www.blaby.co.uk/shop.htm If you do not specify a file name, a file called index.htm would be automatically loaded.

If we want to find specific information we can use one of the many search engines that are available on the WWW. These devices - themselves web pages - allow us to type in words that they will then use to search the WWW and find all pages that include the word(s) we have specified. Most of the search engines have proprietary names such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, Excite or Infoseek. If we use Alta Vista, for example, we can type in the word Blaby and we will get 20 - 30 web pages having that word in them, including one or more of the pages that make up the Blaby on the Net web site.

Web pages are generated by a special type of code called HTML (hypertext markup language). Normally this code is hidden behind what is seen on the web browser. Web pages can be composed either by typing this code or by using special web authoring packages such as Microsoft's Front Page, Hotmetal or PageMill. These perform very much like a Word Processor allowing text and images to be entered directly to the screen while the package composes the HMTL code in the background.

It is of course possible to compose web pages entirely in the html source code and some professional web authors do work in this way using simple text editors. This does however require an extensive knowledge of the html language. If you are planning to work with pictures and graphics and perhaps obtain a scanner, some graphics packages will be needed. Graphics software is often provided when you purchase a scanner. Paintshop is a popular graphics package that can be downloaded from the Internet.

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