For the past year the World Wide Web has been THE hot topic in the Internet community. It makes the Internet friendly territory for the many visitors who might not speak a word of UNIX. Last year there were very few WWW sites; now there are almost as many WWW sites as Gopher sites.

The World Wide Web (WWW), was developed at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva. Like FTP and Gopher, WWW is a system to retrieve files by people anywhere on the Internet. It is like a Gopher site because documents located on different computers can be electronically linked so that they seem to be residing in the same place.

The biggest difference between Gopher and WWW sites is the way information is presented. Instead of using menus and directories to list and connect to files elsewhere, as Gopher does, WWW consists of documents with "embedded hypertext" (highlighted words) that lead the reader to other relevant files or documents on the Internet in more or less the same way that a footnote in a book leads a reader to other books or articles.

For example, here is an excerpt from a recent F&P posting about the Eurasia Foundation:

The Eurasia Foundation supports technical assistance, training, educational, and policy programs in the NIS . . . Information on their "computer communication support" program is here. A file describing "the first 100 grants" made to different organizations is available here. The "Media List" is available here.

The text in quotes would be highlighted and is called "hypertext." Clicking on any highlighted item on the computer screen will take the user to another file or document with more information about that topic. The hypertext acts just like a menu item in Gopher. Unlike Gopher, however, the combination of ordinary text and hyper-text enables WWW sites to provide contextual information about documents existing on the Internet, rather than relying on esoteric or misleading titles, as are sometimes found in Gopher menus.

The people at CERN have created a World Wide Web Virtual Library that has links to files catalogued under 55 different subject categories. CERN also maintains a list of WWW sites organized geographically to enable you to visit a computer almost anywhere from one spot. Many WWW sites have a link to CERN's Virtual Library and site list.

To navigate the World Wide Web one uses what are referred to as WWW "browsers." Mosaic is a WWW browser that has received a lot of press attention in the past six months. Unfortunately Mosaic can only be used by people with a direct Internet connection (e.g., those based at universities). Lynx is another WWW browser. It is accessible to those connected to the Internet by modem.

If you don't have access to a WWW browser, you can telnet to CERN and from there explore the World Wide Web. At the UNIX prompt type:

% telnet info.cern.ch

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