Broadband Telecommunications Handbook, Second Edition
A blockbuster overview of broadband updated and expanded to reflect the latest technologies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Broadband Telecommunications Handbook, Second Edition
World Wide Web (WWW)
The World Wide Web (WWW) has essentially replaced all of these older search engine capabilities. The early WWW often resorted to Gopher or WAIS to actually do the transfer.
The two developments that made the WWW useful were browsers, hypertext, and hyperlinks. Hypertext was a way of encoding formatting information, including fonts, in a document while using plain ASCII characters. Hyperlinks were essentially addresses imbedded in the hypertext web page. By selecting the hyperlink, you were taken directly to a new page.
Browsers
Browsers basically automated the keyword search function that we had done via menus using Gopher. Browsers today are very large and complex programs. Look on your hard drive, and you will find that the Netscape application is about 1.3 MB. With each revision, it gets larger and more complex as new features are added. Microsoft's browser is buried in the operating system, and it is therefore difficult to tell how big it is.
Marc Andreesen was instrumental in creating one of the first browsers called Mosaic. It became the foundation of Netscape's Navigator. Netscape's success can be attributed to the fact that it followed the AOL model of giving away the browser software. Netscape even gave away their source code to its browser on the theory that thousands of heads are better that a few, and eventually it will result in a better product. This same philosophy made Linux such a strong operating system for PC platforms. AOL later acquired Netscape, so...
Copyright The Mc-Graw-Hill Companies, Inc. 2002 under license agreement with Books24x7
