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There also have been several recent and fairly interesting announcements of new products and approaches for Internet telephony. NetSpeak, makers of the $49.95 WebPhone software have announced a Business WebPhone System (BWS). When a user logs onto the Internet, he automatically is registered as active on NetSpeak’s server and is able to receive voice calls without previous arrangement. This works much like the send an instant message capability provided by AOL and others for e-mail purposes. The system will work over any IP network, including one involving workstations connected over LANs to Intranet servers (Intranets are discussed later in this chapter). Additionally, PBX and ACD systems can be customized to support Intranet calling using the BWS software.

Remote Messaging

Integrated, remote messaging over the Internet is a new concept, but one which is technically feasible and which has been translated into real products. Centigram, Enhanced Systems, and others in the messaging business (Chapter 5) have developed system software that allows a remote user to access the office messaging platform. After satisfying the necessary security challenges, the remote worker can download e-mail, voice mail, and fax mail over the Internet. The messages can be played on the user’s multimedia PC, for instance, and responses can be created and uploaded over to the Net to the office platform. The centralized office system then forwards those messages to the originators in their native format—e-mail, voice, or fax. Although the voice is a bit rough, of course, the concept is solid, the products work, the cost of the systems and software are justifiable, and the cost of the call is negligible.

World Wide Web (the Web)

The WorldWide Web (WWW), also known as the Web, is The Internet’s first killer ap. The WWW was developed by Mr. Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland. The Web is a multiplatform web that supports multimedia communications on the basis of a Graphic User Interface (GUI). The GUI provides hypertext, which allows the user to click on a highlighted text word and search related files, across Web servers, through hot links. In other words, the Web is hyperlinked. In addition to text, the Web supports graphics, audio and video, with various levels of quality and speed depending on the bandwidth available.

While CERN conceived the Web, its home now has moved to the W3 Consortium (W3C). W3C is a cooperative venture of CERN, MIT, and Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). The primary focus of W3C is that of the World-Wide Web Core Development (WebCore) project, which is intended to develop Web standards [13-49]. Progress can be monitored through the W3C Web site (of course) at http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Consortium Prospectus/.

The popularity of the Web truly is astounding. From ground zero in 1994, Network Wizards (http://www.nw.com) estimates that there were close to 80,000 WWW-prefixed hosts in January 1996. It is estimated that over 1 TB of data moves across the Web on a monthly basis—that figure is expected to grow to over 20 TB by yearend 1997 [13-8]. While there currently are only 8 million or so Web users, that number is expected to grow to about 200 million by the year 2000 [13-50].

Web Sites and Home Pages

Organizations or even individuals can develop a Web site, consisting of a computing platform (server) connected to the Web on a fulltime basis. Although the typical business approach involves the deployment of a dedicated server, smaller users may achieve the same end through renting Web site capability from an ISP, that logically partitions a server in support of multiple users and multiple Home Pages.

While the number of Web sites was at [approx]100 in March 1993, there currently exist over 80,000 Web sites. Although the rate of growth has slowed as the numbers have gotten bigger, the number of Web sites were doubling every 54 days in September 1995. The Web currently enjoys about 5 million users in 1996, and is expected to grow to about 11 million by 1998, and 22 million by the year 2000, according to Forrester Research. In June 1994, Web traffic reached 1.056 TB, accounting for 6.1% of all Internet traffic.

Home Pages provide a point of presence on the Web for individuals and businesses, typically supporting advertising and informational purposes. Within each Web site is a Home Page, or multimedia informational document that may contain graphics, animated graphics, video clips, and audio clips, as well as text. Individuals may develop Personal Home Pages, that offer updates on personal life along the lines of a cyberspace version of the ever-popular “What I did on my summer vacation.”

A commercially successful example of a Home Page is that of Sun Microsystems. Sun offers customer service information on its Home Page, reporting savings of $4.6 million per year. The quality of Home Pages varies considerably, with some being the cyberspace equivalent of highway billboards—blatantly commercial and considerably out-of-date. Despite the earlier reference to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is not the message.

Universal Resource Locators (URLs)

URLs are unique WWW Addresses assigned to each Web site and to each Home Page. The structure of the URL follows a standard convention which is

     method://host_spec{port}{path}{file}{misc}

For example:

     http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/MarkUp.html

where http = hypertext transport protocol and html = hypertext markup language.

HTTP is the default protocol for transmitting HTML content over the Internet. It advises the browser to use the http protocol in accessing Web documents. HTML was the first programming language for creating compound documents for Web sites, and for supporting hot links to other sites. HTML has the clear advantage of device independence—in other words, the specifics of the user terminal (Macintosh, IBM-compatible PC, or Sun workstation) do not affect the presentation of the file [13-6].

WWW Standards

Standards for the WWW are set by the W3 Consortium, which is run by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Intitut National de Recherche en Informatique Et En (INRIA) in Europe, and in collaboration with CERN. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of WWW, serves as the group’s coordinator.


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