Netscape Tutorial

(A Small Netscape Tutorial)

Welcome! You are about to embark upon a strange and wonderful journey on the Internet, but first you need to learn how to use some tools to make effective use of your time. The program you're using now, called Netscape, is one of those tools. If you already know how to use Netscape, you can skip ahead to learn about the Internet itself. Otherwise, continue reading.

How to Use Netscape

For those unfamiliar with Microsoft Windows:
In this tutorial, the phrase "click on [something]" means you should use the mouse to move the pointer on the screen to that [something], and press the left mouse button. It is likely that some of the text you'll be viewing is longer than one page (such as this tutorial). To scroll through the text, either use the up- and down-arrow keys and the Page up and Page down keys, or use the scroll bar (click on the up- and down-arrow buttons on the right edge of the screen, not to be confused with the up- and down-facing triangles in the upper right-hand corner of the screen). Try this now to familiarize yourself with the process.

The primary element of Netscape is the ability to move from one document to another with just a "click of the mouse". In general, any word which is blue and underlined is a "link" to another document, and can be accessed by moving the mouse pointer over that word (or words) and clicking on it. The concept of being able to access a document from within another document, from within yet another document, etc., is referred to as "hypertext". Click here for a brief demonstration of hypertext.

Well, that seemed to work. You may have noticed that the mouse pointer turns into a hand () when moved over a link. You may also have just noticed that hypertext isn't limited to plain text; it can include pictures as well. A picture can also be a link to another document - as a matter of fact, exactly where you click in a picture can determine what the next document will be. For an example of this, (and a preview of what's available on the Internet) take a look at the graphical menu at the White House, or the Interactive World Map provided by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

"Wait, wasn't the `here' in the above sentence blue before I clicked on it?" Yes, Netscape shows you which links you've already visited by turning them violet.

At the top of the screen, you should see eight "buttons", labelled "Back", "Forward", "Home", "Reload", "Images", "Open", "Print", "Find", and "Stop":

Note that some of the buttons at the top are grey. Only those that are not grey will perform a function. For example, the "Stop" button is always grey except when a document is being loaded (since you can't stop something that isn't going).

Netscape keeps track of what documents you've been looking at, and allows you to move through this "history" of your explorations.

, Clicking on the "Back" button takes you back to the previous document, while the "Forward" button moves you to the next document. For example, if you've followed the instructions so far, clicking on "Back" once will take you to the results of the form you submitted, once more will take you to the "Example of Forms", and yet once more will take you back to the beginning of this tutorial. From that point, clicking on the "Forward" button three times will bring you back here.

The "Home" button takes you back to the screen you saw when you first started Netscape.

"Reload" will reload the current document. This is useful if you accidentally abort a transfer, or if the transfer didn't complete successfully for some reason.

The "images" button is used in conjunction with a feature that allows you to turn off the automatic loading of images. As you will soon learn, images take a long time to transfer (as compared to text). You may wish to turn off auto-loading by clicking on the "Options" menu item at the top of the screen, then choose "Auto Load Images" from the pull-down menu that appears. A checkmark next to "Auto Load Images" indicates that images will be automatically loaded. If you decide you want to see the images on a page, click on the "Images" button. This will load the images for the current page only.

If you are already familiar with the Internet and know where you want to go, "Open" allows you to enter a Uniform Resource Locator. The current Uniform Resource Locator is displayed under the bar of buttons. More on URLs later.

"Print" will print the current document to the printer. If you would like to see what the document will look like on the printer before you print it, there is a preview option: Click on the word "File" (upper left corner of the screen), then click on the words "Print Preview" when the pull-down menu appears.

"Find" lets you search for a specific word in the current document. Try clicking on "Find" and search for the word "progress". For those unfamiliar with Windows: When you click on "Find", a "dialog box" will appear. Type in the word you're looking for, and click on "Find next". Netscape will find the first occurance of that word, and highlight it. The highlighted word may be hidden behind the "Find" dialog box, so click on Cancel to make the dialog box go away. Repeat the entire process to find the next occurance of the word. If the word is not found, you'll receive the message, "Search string not found".

As will be explained shortly, most of the documents and images you will be viewing need to be transferred from remote computers. "Stop" will abort a transfer in progress (use this when you feel the transfer is taking too long, or if you've found something more interesting to look at). Please note that this can only be used when a transfer is in progress. How will you know that a transfer is in progress? There are a few ways to tell:

The "Stop" button will be red
Notice the big "N" in the upper-right hand corner of the screen. If there is an animation of a meteor shower there, a transfer is in progress.
A line at the very bottom of the screen will indicate the progress of the transfer.

What is this:

? With a little imagination, you can make it look like a torn piece of paper. When Netscape fails to retrieve an image, it displays this torn paper to let you know that something went wrong. This may be caused by a transient error; try loading the document again by clicking on "Reload".

You now know enough to use Netscape effectively. There are a few more topics for the enthusiastic user: about the right mouse button and saving to a floppy disk, printing tips and tricks, helper applications, and e-mail. If you want yet more information about Netscape, The Netscape Handbook is available from the creators of Netscape.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is a global network of networks. What's a network? A network is a cluster of computers connected together, allowing them to exchange information. The Internet allows any connected computer to exchange information with any other connected computer in the world. Just as radio waves allow the transmission of different kinds of information (morse code, voice, music, television), the Internet is the medium for the transmission of many types of data, like text, pictures, and even live sound and video.

Most computers on the Internet have a name

Computers on the Internet are called hosts, and most have a unique name. Hostnames are organized hierarchically - for example, any hostname that ends with "edu" belongs to an educational facility. Any hostname that ends with "uiuc.edu" belongs to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which of course is an educational facility. Any hostname that ends with "ncsa.uiuc.edu" belongs to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which is an educational facility. Get the picture? Here's what some other endings of hostnames mean:

gov Federal government
mil Military
net Regional network
com Commercial organization
org Any organization that doesn't fall into the above catagories

Not all hostnames end with the above letters. Those not in the United States (and a lot that are) end in a two-letter "country code".

There are different means of transferring data across the Internet.

Information is tranferred over the Internet by a variety of different methods, or "protocols". Here are the main ones, all of which are supported by Netscape:

The World Wide Web (HyperText Transfer Protocol): This relative newcomer is presently the most popular way to distribute information on the Internet. The Web exploits hypertext (discussed at the beginning of this tutorial) and graphics, which allows information to be presented in a format similar to a full-color magazine, with cross-references accessed by a click of the mouse.
Gopher: Created at the University of Minnesota (their mascot is a gopher), Gopher presents the user with a text-only menu. Try the gopher at the University of Minnesota.
FTP: File Transfer Protocol allows the exchange of computer files across the Internet.
From free programs you can run on your computer to archives of images and sounds.
Telnet: Interactive text-only terminal session, mostly used for searching library catalogs and other databases.

About Uniform Resource Locators

Before Netscape can retrieve information from a host, it needs to know at least two things: the method used to retrieve the information (http [world wide web], gopher, ftp or telnet), and the name of the host. Occasionally, the location of the information on that host is also required. This information is provided to Netscape by what's called a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL for short. A URL is formed by taking the method of transfer, followed by "://", then the hostname, then optionally a path to the location of information on that host. For example, information about Rutgers University can be accessed using the following URL:

http://www.rutgers.edu The host to contact is "www.rutgers.edu", and the method of information retrieval is http (HyperText Transfer Protocol). You can tell that this is a host offering information on the World Wide Web by looking at the method of transfer (http), and also by the fact that the hostname begins with "www". An article in the August 14, 1995 issue of Newsweek states that a schedule of events for the Summer Olympic games in Atlanta is available at

http://www.atlanta.olympic.org

You should recognize this as an URL. To access this site, just click on the "Open" button at the top of the screen and type

http://www.atlanta.olympic.org

How does hypertext work?

Part of the magic of hypertext is that a URL is "hidden" under a hypertext link, so that when you click on it, Netscape knows where to go next. For example:

Move the mouse pointer over the word "here" in the next paragraph. Notice the line at the bottom of the screen; that line tells you where Netscape will take you next if you click the mouse.

Click here for information about the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.

You may have noticed advertisements for "The Toy Story" Web site at http://www.toystory.com, or the "Sci-Fi Channel" Web site at http://www.scifi.com. These advertisements are giving you the URL that you need to type to access those sites.

Resources available on the Internet

If you don't already have a URL (if you don't already know where you want to go), there are a few ways of finding information about something that you're interested in. Many indexes of what's available on the Web exist, and they're searchable by keyword. Try doing a keyword search now. If you want to do a more general search, there are many subject lists to choose from. Here are some fun and interesting places to go.
Be aware that the Internet can not supply the answer to all questions. No site is going to offer every song from The Beatles' "Abbey Road" for downloading, lest they very quickly get sued. You may find a searchable magazine index, but you'll either have to subscribe to that service or pay on a per-search basis. Remember you can't break the Internet, so explore fearlessly.