Previous | Table of Contents | Next |
WWW applications include advertising, publishing, micromarketing, catalogs and direct sales, and entertainment. The great hope is that the Web will become a significant tool for commerce, allowing customers to access a Home Page on a Web site, gain information about a product or service, and actually make a purchase online. Largely due to security concerns, that application is expected to reach only $518 million in 1996, up from $350 million in 1995, according to Forrester Research [13-51]. IDC predicts that in the year 2000, over 200 million Web users will conduct $150 to $200 billion of commerce over the Net [13-50]. Reportedly, Home Pages are being added at the rate of one every four seconds! [13-51].
Commercial Home Pages
Home Page sponsorship is offered by several directories and frequently-hit home pages. Netscape sells sponsorships for $40,000 to $60,000 per quarter; Time Warner, $30,000; and Hotwired, $15,000. In return for this rather princely sum, your home-page banner will appear on their home page; users can click on your banner and hyperlink to your home page [13-52].
Zima now advertises its home page on six different home pages. The Marin Institute for the Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems (San Rafael, California) and others have complained loudly about such cyberbooze encounters. Zima countered by suggesting that it is a responsible cybercitizen, clearly asking that the user be at least 21 years of age to join Tribe Z.
Personal Home Pages
Personal Home Pages exist by the thousands. Photos of children, audio clips of the growls and screeches of family pets, and video clips of summer vacationsall of these are possible and all of these are present on The Net! Truly bored NetHeads can while away their time with such Home Pages as:
The huge number of servers and incredible amount of information available on the Internet and Web quickly made it difficult to find the desired resource. One couldnt find the information unless one knew pretty much where to find itsort of like having to know at least the approximate spelling of a word in order to look it up in the dictionary to determine the exact spelling. This problem was addressed in the early 1990s through the development of search mechanisms and, more recently, Web browsers.
Search mechanisms are in the form of client/server software that support the search for Internet informational resources, through the development and maintenance of resource directories. The first primitive text browser appeared in 1991, courtesy of CERN. In 1993, the first graphical browsers appeared: Viola for X windows, Mac browser from CERN and Mosaic for X Windows [13-49]. Browsers which are widely used include Archie, Gopher, Veronica, Jughead and WAIS. While Netscape and Mosaic are the most popular, a great number of others exist, as well [13-19].
Archie
A corruption of archive, Archie is a FTP search mechanism first deployed in 1991. Archie allows one to search for a file (exact name unknown) on a file server (name unknown) somewhere on the Net. Archie servers contain directory listings of all such files, updated on a monthly basis through a process of file server polling. Archie will provide a user-definable number of file hits, as well as file names, server names, and directory paths to access each listed file. Archie capabilities are limited to specific search strings, thereby providing little flexibility. Currently, Archie is often integrated into Gopher or WWW clients, to be activated when the user accesses an Archie server.
Gopher
Developed at the University of Minnesota, where the Golden Gopher is the school mascot, Gopher is a user interface that provides easy access to server resources in educational institutions. Gopher has become a de facto user interface standard allowing users access to a directory of over 1,800 Gopher server sites, click on the name of the server, and browse its file resources on the basis of nested menus. Gopher requires that the user know the server on which the subject file is located, somewhere in gopherspace.
Veronica
Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) is an Archie variation that supports an index of Gopherspace titles on which a search can be performed. The selected resources are then delivered to the user in the form of a Gopher menu.
Jughead
Jughead (Jonzys Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) is quite similar in operation to Veronica, although it limits the search to a specific organization. Jughead also delivers a custom menu of available resources located on the basis of the keyword search. Playing off Archie and Gopher, subsequent developers of search mechanisms tried to stay with the Archie comic book/rodent theme, proving for once and for all that even acronyms can be fun. Alas, the more recent and more powerful browsers were not named with a noticeable sense of humor.
Mosaic
Mosaic is a browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Mosaic provides a consistent user interface supporting Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, and UNIX X-Windows. Mosaic can used over either dedicated or dialup Internet connections. The dialup access provider must support either SLIP or PPP. Mosaic allows the easy browsing of WWW resources through menus that support hypertext. Through a simple process of mouse-clicking, the user can select menu options. Selected files can include audio and graphics, both of which can be viewed without the requirement to download the subject file.
Mosaic technology is licensed by the NCSA for commercial application. Spyglass, Inc. has licensed well over 12 million copies of Mosaic to IBM, DEC, and others who intend to resell the companys Enhanced Mosaic. Enhanced Mosaic includes enhanced security mechanisms based on S-HTTP (Secure HTTP).
Netscape Navigator
Developed by Netscape Communications, Netscape Navigator was built by a team led by Marc Andersen, creator of the original Mosaic. It features simultaneous image loading and continuous document streaming speed performance.
Previous | Table of Contents | Next |