ADVANCED CONCEPT OF INTERNET

Uniform Resource Locator

A URL (or uniform resource locator) is the address of an Internet page on a Web
site. Usually it consists of four parts: protocol, server (or domain), path, and
filename. Often, when you go to the very first page of a Web site, called the home
page, theres no path or filename. Heres an example:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/default.asp
http is the protocol
www.microsoft.com is the server
windows/ is the path
default.asp is the filename of the page on the site
Communication Protocol
Protocol is a set of rules created for the process of communication with another
computer or with an operating system
The first element in the URL is the protocol. This is the service that provides the resource, followed by a
colon. The default taken is http: if you dont specify other service. The protocol specifies the computer
language used to transfer information. Specifically, a protocol tells the browser where the information is
located (for example, on a web server, an FTP (file transfer protocol) server, a local hard drive, and so
on). The protocol tells the browser what to expect from the document retrieval process.
Table : Common Protocols
Protocol
Use
http:/ /

For HTML documents and associated files on the web

ftp://

For documents on the FTP server

Gopher://

For documents on the Gopher server

telnet://

To open a telnet connect to a specific host.

Host Name: host name is the server that contains the resource, preceded by two
slashes (either. in the form of a domain name or an IP address). In other words the
hostname is the name of the server that holds HTML documents and related files.
Folder name: folder names give document on the servers file system. Folders
perform the same function on a web server that they perform on your PC (i.e. they
organize documents). Theres virtually no limit to how deep you can nest folders,
and theres no limit as to what files the folders can contain.

File name: file names are the names of specific documents. It identifies the file
(an HTML document, an image, a text file, and so on) to be displayed. In the above
example, the file index.html is displayed. This file is kept in the folder virtual.
Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol ( TCP/IP ) are most commonly
used protocol in the Internet. They mainly deal with slicing the data into small
sized packets and routing them along the communication channel. These packets
are routed to their destination and passed through from node to node and are
assembled in order to form the data at the destination computer.
TCP/IP is a very popular protocol used in conjunction with internet. To establish a
link between two computers on the internet, it is required to frame certain rules
and regulations so that the data communication between the computers may take
place. A protocol means a set of rules which is accepted globally. TCP/IP is the
protocol which defines the rules and algorithm for data communication between
different computers.
To establish a link between two or more computers, it is required to define the
address of the computer. This address must be unique. Rules and regulations for
secure transmission of data over the communication channel are also required.
TCP/IP is divided into two set of protocols one is called TCP or Transmission Control
Protocol and other is called IP or Internet Protocol.
Transmission Control Protocol
This deals with packets over networks. The packets are small pieces of data meant
for effective and safe communication over the network. To send a block of data
over a communication channel, the data is divided into various pieces and these
pieces of data are communicated as packets. These packets have to follow a long
path, traversing from one computer or node to another computer. This process is
called routing. The size of packets is decided on the basis of network capability.
The TCP also ensures the safe delivery at the destination and the assembling of all
the packets to get the complete lot of data at the destination computers.
Internet Protocol
This mainly deals with the addresses of computers. The Internet Protocol decides
the address of computer to be labelled on the packet. This allows various
computers or intermediate nodes to read the address of the destination computer
and route the packet to the destination node.
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

A web page is transferred to a users computer via the hypertext transfer protocol
(HTTP). HTTP is the method through which hypertext files such as web pages, are
transferred over the internet. HTTP is a client/server based internet protocol.
Web pages generally reside on HTTP servers. A user requests a web page from an HTTP server through
his or her web browser client software. Either by clicking on a hypertext link or designating a particular
URL (uniform resource locator). The server then sends the requested information to the users computer.
The browser software interprets the HTML codes and presents the information contained in the web
page in a readable format on the users computer.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
FTP is part of the TCP /IP protocol suite. It is a protocol or set of rules, which
enables files to be transferred between computers. Ftp works on the client/ server
principle. A client programme enables the user to interact with a server in order to
access information and services on the server computer. Files that can be
transferred are stored on computers called FTP servers. To access these files, an
FTP client programme is used. This is an interface that allows the user to locate the
file(s) to be transferred and initiate the transfer process.
Anonymous ftp allows a user to access a wealth of publicly available information.
No special account or password is needed. There are a wide variety of files that are
publicly available through anonymous ftp. They are:
Shareware: software that you can use free for a trial period but then pay a fee for
the licensed version.
Freeware: completely free software, for example fonts, clipart and games.
Upgrades and Patches: upgrades to amend software and fixes for softwareproblems available either free or against charges.
Documents:

examples

include

research

papers,

articles

and

Internet

documentation.
Files on FTP servers are often compressed. Compression decreases file size and
this enables more files to be stored on the server and makes file transfer times
shorter. In order to use a compressed file the user needs to decompress it using
appropriate software. It is a good idea to have current virus checking software on
the computer before files are transferred on it.
Ws-FTP32 LE is a top rated and very popular FTP programme from John Junod. It is given away free to
certain non-commercial users.
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
This protocol is used for the delivery of E Mail. When an E mail is to be sent, then
the Mail Transfer Program contacts the remote machine and forms a TCP
connection over which to e-mail is transferred. Once the connection is established,

then Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) identifies the sender itself, specifies the
recipient of mail and then transfers the E mail message. Other features included in
the SMTP are that it allows the sender to ask whether the mailbox to which the
mail is directed, does exist on the remote computer or not. It also enables the
sender to keep a copy of the mail until it removed or deleted.
Post Office Protocol
If youre accessing the Internet using a PC or Macintosh, there are several different
ways you can read and send email. One of the more popular applications uses the
Post Office Protocol (POP). In a nutshell, the POP system allows your personal
workstation to get its email from a big computer that serves as a post office,
delivering the mail when you (or your computer) ask for it. This eliminates the
need for your computer to be on all the time, constantly available to receive email.
In order to use a POP-based email application, you need Internet access (via dialup or full-time connectivity) and a POP mail account on a post office computer (ask
your Internet provider). All of these applications provide intuitive editors.
Point to Point Protocol (PPP)
This is used when the Internet is accessed using a telephone line. Normally, in India, the server of the
Internet Service provider (ISP) is accessed from the home or office through the telephone line. PPP is
the set of rules which specify how the data will be communicated over telephone line from your
computer when the connection with your ISP has been established. This protocol is used in conjunction
with Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP).
This protocol is used when the communication is done over a serial transmission line like the telephone
line. The protocol allows the user to use GUI based web browsers like Netscape and MS Internet
Explorer. Internet Service providers use the PPP and SLIP account to enable users to view graphics on
the Internet. These accounts assign an IP address to your computer when a connection is established.
Telnet
Telnet is a protocol, or set of rules, that enables one computer to connect to
another computer. This process is also referred to as remote login. The users
computer, which initiates the connect icon, is referred to as the local computer and
the machine being connected to, which accepts the connection, is referred to as
the remote or host computer.
Once connected, the user computer emulates the remote computer. When the user
types in commands, they are executed on the remote computer. The user monitor
displays what is taking place on the remote computer during the telnet session.
Gopher
Gopher is a protocol designed to search, retrieve and display documents from
remote sites on the Internet. It accomplishes this using the client / server model of

users running client software on their local machines that provide an interface that
interacts with remote servers or computers that have information of their interest.
In addition to document display and document retrieval, it is possible to initiate online connections with other systems via gopher. Information accessible via gopher
is stored on many computers all over the Internet. These computers are called
gopher servers.
Users interact with gopher via a hierarchy of menus and can use full-text searching
capabilities of gopher to identify desired documents. Once an appropriate item is
selected, gopher retrieves it from wherever on the network it resides and (if it is
text) displays it. The users may feel as if all the information available to gopher
resides on their local computer, when in fact, gopher is interacting with a large
number of independently owned and operated computers around the world.
Gopher client software exists for most computer platforms.
Archie
These are thousands of anonymous ftp servers around the world offering more files
than you can imagine. The role of Archie is to make the whole system manageable
by helping you find what you need. There are a number of Archie servers around
the net, each of which consists a database of most of the files that are publicly
available via anonymous ftp.
Suppose you want a particular file -for instance, a programme but you dont know
which anonymous ftp server has the file. You use an Archie client to convert to an
Archie server. You can have your client ask the server to search for files that have
the same name as the programme you want.
After a short wait, the server will send back a list of addresses of some of the
Internet sites that have files with that name. Once you know where to look, it is a
simple matter to use ftp to download the file. The term Archie was chosen to
express the idea of an archive server.
Veronica and Jughead
Like the web, Gopherspace is large and full of menu items than you could ever find
on your own. To help you find things in Gopherspace you can use veronica: a tool
that keeps track of an enormous number of gopher menu items from all over the
net. You can use Veronica to perform a search and look for all the menu items in
gopherspace continuing certain keywords. A related tool, Jughead does the same
thing for a specific group of gopher menus, say, and all the menus at a particular
university.
After Veronica or Jughead finishes searching, you will be presented with a new
menu containing the names of whatever items were found. To access one of these

items, all you need to do select it, and your gopher client will connect you to the
appropriate gopher server automatically. The results of a typical Veronica search
will be items from around the net, but you wont need to know any of the details:
your client will take care of everything for you.
Wide Area Information Service (WAIS)
WAIS is an Internet search tool that is based on a certain protocol. It works on the
client / server principle. A WAIS client programme enables the user computer to
contact a WAIS server, submit a search query and receive a response to that query.
WAIS has the capability of simultaneously searching more than one database. After
the search phrase has been typed into the client interface, the user can then
choose which databases should be used to complete the search. Depending on the
WAIS client software being used, this may be a matter of using a mouse to select
database names displayed on a screen, or of typing in the database names using
the keyboard. It is very important to know that WAIS indirectly searches the
database. The database itself is not being searched for the requested search
phase. Rather, an index for the database is searched. The index is created by
people, and can contain all, or a number of words in all of the items contained in
the database. Once the search has been executed, all items containing the words
appearing in the search phrase will be returned to the user, provided that the
words in the search phrase appear in the indexes of the selected databases.
INTERNET TOOLS
E-mail
The conventional mailing by post can take several days to travel across the country and weeks to go
around the world. That is why nowadays it is referred to as snail mail. In recent times, e-mail or
electronic mails being used to send and receive messages. It saves time and money, is fast, easy to use
and less expensive than the post. You can send e-mail practically to anyone with an e-mail address,
anywhere in the world. So what is e-mail? Its simplest form, e-mail is an electronic message sent from
one computer to another. You can send or receive personal and business-related messages with
attachments like pictures or other documents.
Just as a letter or document stops at the different postal stations along its way, email is passed from one computer to an- other as it travels along the network. Each
computer reads the e-mail address and routes it to another computer until it
eventually reaches its destination. Its then stored in an electronic mailbox. With
the internet this whole process usually takes just a few minutes, allowing you to
communicate quickly and easily with millions of people around the world anytime
of the day or night, for the cost of a local phone call.

Until recently, e-mail on the internet was good only for short notes. You couldnt
send attachments like formatted documents or graphics. With the advent of MIME
(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension) and other types of encoding schemes, like
UUencode, not only can you send messages electronically, but you can also send
formatted documents, photos, sound files, and video files as attachments.
Search Engine
Search engines are Web sites that help you search the Internet for other Web sites
based on keywords you provide.
Databases of web sites that use spiders or robots to search the web and catalog web pages and make it
convenient for you to search. Popular search engines include:
Google
Yahoo
Infoseek
Indiatimes

Lycos
Altavista
Excite
Hotbot etc.

Special www sites that offer a facility by which you can search the web or Usenet for information. Alta
Vista (http://www.altavista.co.uk/), for example, provides a keyword search that scans every word of
every page on the web. Yahoo permits you to search by following ever-decreasing menus. Your browser
will take you to a site featuring a number of web search engines.
DEFINITION OF WORLD WIDE WEB (WEB, WWW OR W3)
World Wide Web (www) is a repository of information spread all over the world and
linked together. WWW uses the concept of hypertext. In this environment,
information is stored in a set of documents. Concept of pointers are used to link
the documents together. An item could be associated with another document using
the pointers. A reader who browses through a document can move to other
documents by clicking the items that are linked to other documents. A hypertext
on the web is known as a page and the main page for an organisation / an
individual is called as a home page. After establishing a web hosting arrangement
with ISP it will allocate storage space on its server that will be accessed each time
a request comes in. We are now ready to create our first web page or home page
or index page and load it into this storage space. Web pages are created, using
one of the many web design software packages like Quicksite or Microsofts Front
page or by utilising the services of a web designer. Web pages utilize the main
software language of the Internet HTML although many now use other languages
and software in addition to HTML, such as Java by Sun Microsystems or Coldfusion
by Allaire. Information on any subject can be:
Undistributed -whole information may consist of one or more web pages on
the same server.

 Distributed -Information made up of many pages distributed on different

servers.
It is another information retrieval tool. The web is attractively easy to use, and
lends itself to publishing or providing information to anyone interested. Its
popularity has increased dramatically, because of easy usage, colorful and rich in
content. Web is a series of interconnected documents stored on computer sites. If
you use your computer and a software program (browser) to visit a site on the
web, the screen displays a document called a home page. Home page gives the
name of the organisation or individual sponsoring the website and displays a list of
highlighted words, buttons or pictures. It is the text and graphical screen display
that welcomes the user and explains the organisation that has established the
page. This will lead to other pages, with all the pages of company being known as
a website. For a corporation to establish a presence on the web, therefore, it must
set up a website of its one or more pages. The web is a network of billions of
interlinked documents. These links called hyperlinks or links are the highlighted
words, buttons, icons or pictures. Each link contains the address of another
document on the same computer or another computer anywhere in the world; from
this one can jump to the linked pages by clicking on one of these links. Clicking
them plays videos, music, 3D animations or takes one through a virtual reality
experience.
It is a set of standards for storing, retrieving, formatting and displaying information
using a client / server architecture, graphical user interfaces (GUI) and a hyper text
language that enable dynamic links to other documents. It is one of the most
exciting Internet services. Worldwide Web (www) has a vast canvas of web servers
that provide an idea almost similar to that of a hypertext. A page in hypertext may
contain links that point to other documents or to other segments in the same
document. When users click on a link, they jump to other documents/other
segments in the same document. Users can navigate the web easily, pushing their
interests.
One of the main functions of the Internet is easy to use offerings of information
and products. This function is provided by the World Wide Web which is at the
heart of the recent explosion in the business use of the Net. This is based on an
hypertext language called Hypertext Mark up Language (HTML} that formats
documents and incorporates dynamic links to other documents and pictures stored
in the same or remote computers.
World Wide Web and Internet are not the same though people think they are the
same. The Internet is the network itself and many activities other than the world

wide web will be done on it. The services like E-mail, Gopher, Usenet news groups
are available separately, and access to them has been integrated into the world
wide web. While the other methods of locating information on the Net are mainly
text based, the web pages have made an impact by combining text, hypermedia,
graphics and sound. Through the use of web, commercial enterprises are providing
information on demand (say customer support, marketing and sales). The specific
hypermedia technology used in the web is known as hyperlink, navigating (or
surfing} the web requires a graphics computer linked to the Internet and web
browser. The user must also have a special software tool to navigate the web
known as a web browser. A popular web browser is Mosaic, developed by the
National Centre for Super Computing Applications. There is another web browser
known as Travel Web, a website that gives complete details of electronic
information on 16 resort hotels in the USA and the Caribbean and similar
information on 87 non-resort hotels in North America. Prospective travellers can
use Travel Web any time to find out information on hotel details, sight seeing
attractions related to USA and Caribbean. The world wide web needs:
A functional architecture.
A structural Architecture and
A navigational architecture
WWW TECHNOLOGIES
Web Page
A web page is a single unit of information, often called a document that is available
via the World Wide Web (www). A web page can be longer than one computer
screen and can use more than one piece of paper when it is printed out.
A web page is created using HTML. It consists of standardized codes or tags, that are used to define
the structure of information on a web page. These codes enable web pages to have many features
including bold text, italic text, headings, paragraph break and numbered or bulleted lists.
Web Browser
Web browsers are applications that retrieve content in the form of HTML from web
servers. Browsers keep track of the users input actions, for example; clicking
buttons or selecting links-and executing those actions.
By 1992, the basic idea of hypertext-data containing links to other data had been
explored and was widely accessible on the net. However, the number of people
using the web was still small. This was because the principal web client
programmes ran under text-based Unix systems and were awkward to use.
This all changed in 1993, when Mark Andersen; then a student at the University of
Illinois, released a new programme called Mosaic. Mosaic was the original graphical

web browser. Mosaic used the original text web browser, Linux as a model. After
the release of Mosaic, the popularity of the World Wide Web exploded. Mark
Andersen formed a new company Netscape and released Netscape navigator.
After the release of navigator 2, Microsoft woke up to the Internet and realized the
vast potential of this entirely new market. In short time the company released
Internet explorer, which in its original version wasnt very compelling.
Other web browsers were spry Mosaic, Lynx, HotJava etc. Spry Mosaic is a licensed
descendent of NCSA Mosaic. Spry has licensed it for use as the CompuServe web
browser. Lynx is the original text only web browser developed at CERN to support
only pure HTML. HotJava is a web browser that Sun wrote entirely in Java as a
demonstration of the programming power of the Java language.
Netscape communicator (initially called as Netscape navigator) and Internet
explorer are the two browsers that are most popular. Regardless of which browser
you use, web browsers may support some or all of these features:

Bookmarks for favorite web sites

Multiple browsing windows

Frames or multiple views within a window

Secure data transmission

Java and other languages support

Web interface to FTP and Gopher Internet sites.

Hypertext Markup language (HTML)

HTML defines several aspects of a web page including heading levels, bold, italics, images, paragraph
breaks and hypertext links to other resources. HTML can be compared to word processing. The text in a
word processed file can be formatted in various ways. For example, a heading can be bold and in larger
font size than the rest of the document. Also, specific words can be italicized for emphasis.
Thus, HTML is a way to define the formats of text in a web page. However, it goes further by also being
able to define placement of graphics and hypertext links. HTML is a sub-language of SGML, or
Standard Generalized Markup Language. SGML is a system that defines and standardizes the structure
of documents. Both SGML and HTML utilize descriptive markup to define the structure of an area of
text. In general terms, descriptive markup does not specify a particular font or point size for an area of
text, Therefore, in HTML, text is marked as a heading, subheading, numbered list, bold, italic, etc.
HTML is standardized and portable. A document that has been prepared using HTML markup tag can
be viewed using a variety of web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Netscape and Lynx. A browser
interprets the tags in an HTML file and presents the file as a formatted, readable web page. In addition,
HTML documents can be viewed on all types of systems, such as Macintosh, PCs and UNIX machines.
HTML Tags

HTML tags are used to define areas of a document as having certain

characteristics. The tags used in HTML usually consist of a code in between two
wickets. These codes are called container tags because the formatting described
by the tag affects only the text contained between the tags. For example, <B> and
</B> are the starting and ending tags used to indicate an area as bold. HTML tags
are used to define heading levels, such as <Hl> and </Hl>. Heading levels can go
to <H6>, with each successive number indicating a smaller heading size.
Some other basic HTML tags are:
<1> and </1> to indicate italics
.<img src=name-of-picture> to place an image in a document file
<p> to create a paragraph break
In HTML, some codes require end tag and some do not require end tags. In the
previous example, the <p> tag indicates a paragraph break. This type of tag is
called an empty tag because no end tag is required.
Web pages can contain text, images, sound files, video files and hyperlinks to other internet resources.
All these features are indicated by using HTML codes.