Text and illustrations
© 1998-2008
Brian R. Johnson
except student work
as noted
THE WEB:
Overview
Way Beyond Whatever Charlotte Might Have Imagined
A Different Way to Wander
One of the amazing things about the web is that the user needs only a relatively simple piece of display software and a network connection to access it. In a stark contrast with the usual model of personal computer use, the documents being viewed don't reside on the user's computer. Instead, they are stored on computers sprinkled all over the world and connected together in a communications network called the Internet. This relationship is called a client-server relationship. The user's machine is the client and the various computers to which you connect to download documents are servers.Another amazing thing about the web is that the same document, or web page, can be viewed on everything from a text-only display to a high-performance workstation, on black and white or color displays, with a Macintosh or a Windows computer, and so on. This is quite intentional. The browser on each computer is responsible for rendering the actual display. The document contains information about how that should be done, but the information is advisory, not absolutely controlling.
The final important ingredient to the explosion of the web is the ability to include references to a web document in another web document. When the user clicks on one of these links the browser is told to retrieve a new document. This document may come from anywhere on the Internet. It may include links too.
Suffice it to say that many users spend hours and hours wandering the web.
Last updated: November 11, 1997