Return to Braley Consulting Services, Inc. Home Page
While the World Wide Web (The Web) is not the Internet, it is the primary
reason this network of networks has burst into public view in the last three years.
For more than twenty years the Internet was the exclusive realm of scientists and
others seriously interested in searching databases that were extremely difficult
to access.
The need for access to information has always existed no matter what form the information
took. The more information you have, the greater the need for organization. Organizing
tools for the Internet, unfortunately, were very late in arriving.
Early Internet applications focused on three areas: e-mail, remote log-on (Telnet)
and file downloading (FTP). Telnet was a boon to researchers since a user could sign
on to a computer thousands of miles away using a standard protocol. As the collection
of files on the Internet grew, however, file retrieval became the most important
application. Before 1989 retrieving a file required two things - knowledge of the
UNIX programming language and the exact name and location of the file. No wonder
the general public was not involved.
Students at McGill University developed the Archie software to organize FTP files.
File Transfer Protocol is the method by which files are transferred throughout the
Internet. A user could contact an Archie Server - an Internet host that kept a list
of files on the Internet - to determine where a particular file might be located.
"User Friendliness" made its debut on the Internet in 1991 when Gopher
was introduced by the University of Minnesota. This system allowed Internet resources
to be listed on a Gopher server and accessed by a simple menu system - a major improvement
over the FTP/Archie requirement for typing obscure file names.
The real breakthrough occurred with the development of the World Wide Web in 1991
by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. The Web represented the first of
two steps required to bring order out of chaos. It allowed documents to be linked
to one another with imbedded codes so that moving from article to article and computer
to computer was a painless procedure. You could find out quite a bit about a subject
if you located a "starting" document and if authors created sufficient
links to other documents.
The most dramatic and recent improvements in accessibility have been brought about
by the development of Directories and Search Engines that organize millions of Internet
files whether or not they were linked by their authors. These tools like all the
others discussed so far require a host computer with special software (a server)
to maintain a database. These databases are developed with two different approaches.
A Directory such as Yahoo is a structured index with topics and subtopics where all
the material has been reviewed and organized by human beings.
A Search Engine is a program that continuously scans Internet files and develops
indices automatically. Early versions indexed on limited fields such as title and
author while the more recent versions such as AltaVista index every word in nearly
30 million files. Because of the two different approaches, the quantity of material
found by a Search Engine is huge while the quality in a Directory is superior. Considering
the size of the databases, the access speed is remarkable - often less than ten seconds
for a Search Engine query.
Although both systems only maintain an index - they do not store the actual documents
- the end result is a list of files that are retrievable by clicking on the title
which is linked to the appropriate computer and file. The files you find are not
just documents; many are databases and lists of other materials that are also linked.
The next major improvement in "usability" after Gopher, came about with
the creation of the Web Browser. A browser is a client program on the users PC that
presents Web documents attractively - including variations in text size, style and
placement, as well as background colors and graphics. To accomplish this, the author
of the document must "mark it up" using Hypertext Markup Language to indicate
to the browser how the material is to be displayed. Last month's column covered this
subject in some detail.
Currently Netscape 2.0 is the leading browser while Mosaic, Microsoft Internet Navigator
and Netcruiser are also popular. While the original motivation for the browser was
to make Web navigation easier and document presentation more attractive, most browsers
go beyond those early goals.
Early applications such as Telnet, FTP and e-mail, required separate client programs.
but recent browsers have combined Web access with the other services to become the
"universal client". A browser such as Netscape lets the user retrieve files
by FTP and send e-mail although these functions are unrelated to the World Wide Web.
Browser capabilities are evolving at a mind numbing pace. While a year ago a good
browser could retrieve and display static web pages including text and graphics in
an attractive format, a current version can automatically download and play audio
and video files, allow multiple independent windows (called frames) provide a static
banner for scrolling displays (a ledge), and is beginning to introduce downloaded
software through the Java technology developed by Sun Microsystems.
It is this latter capability - the ability to download a program as part of a
Web page - that is causing the most excitement today. The concept of a "dumb"
computer selling for $500 that would receive software as needed from a network has
major electronics firms in a turmoil. The "hype machines" are running at
full blast while the companies are beginning to "place their bets" on a
technology that may or may not develop.
Although there are many barriers the Network Computer (NC) including slow Internet
speed (lack of "bandwidth") and an ongoing debate about who would use such
a device, there appears to be one major advantage for certain corporate users. The
cost of maintaining a network of hundreds or thousands of PCs where each machine
may have a gigabyte of storage and a different hardware and software configuration
is enormous.
The idea that all software and files could be stored centrally on an "Intranet"
- an in-house system based on Internet technology - is certainly appealing. If this
sounds like a throwback to the mainframes of the sixties and seventies, it is. Many
corporate users will undoubtedly be using the equivalent of a "dumb terminal"
to access a central system in the next few years.
To review and bring together some of the concepts discussed in recent columns:
Next month's column will focus on the recently developed CLMA Web site. For those
of you with Internet Web access, the temporary URL of this still developing site
is