Exploring the Web with &browser.name.prefix;TM &browser.name.suffix;


Exploring the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a vast collection of information stored on computers located all around the world. People have created web pages that contain information on just about any topic you can imagine. You can view these pages with &browser.name.prefix;TM &browser.name.suffix;. Web pages can consist of text, images, audio files, movies, animation, and interactive computer applications called JavaTM applets.

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the language used to create web pages. &browser.name; &release.version; supports HTML 3.2, plus many popular HTML extensions.

If you would like to learn more about HTML, see A Beginner's Guide to HTML, provided by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Application).

Toolbar Navigation Buttons

The Toolbar buttons provide shortcuts for menu items, and most of them help you navigate around the Web.

Follow the links below for detailed information about each one, or see the Getting Started Navigation Page for a summary of all the toolbar button functions.

 Back    Forward    Home  
 Reload    Stop    Search  
 Print  

Web Site Addresses (URLs)

You can visit web pages and other places on the Internet by following hypertext links on the current page or by typing in a specific address, or URL, in the Address field. URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the Internet term for web site addresses that conform to a specific format recognized by browsers. (See A Beginner's Guide to URLs, a document provided by the NCSA.)

To visit a place on the Web, click in the Address field, which is normally found in the header or footer of the &browser.name; window. Then type the desired URL directly into the Address field and press Return or Enter to display the specified web page.

If you have chosen not to display the Address field in either the header or footer, choose Open from the File menu (or display a pop-up menu by clicking the right mouse button) to display an Address field in a separate pop-up window.

The first part of a URL (the part before the ":") is the Internet transfer protocol of the page you are trying to access. This indicates the page type and how the browser accesses the page. See the next section ("Supported Protocols") to find out about the different types of URLs that you can use in &browser.name;.

Supported Protocols

You can use &browser.name; to visit web pages, display documents, send email, and browse GOPHER and FTP sites. &browser.name; supports these major Internet transfer protocols:
http
This stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, the standard protocol used to access pages on the Internet.

To visit a web page, type:

http://Internet-host/path-to-document

in the Address field and press Return or Enter.

You can omit the http:// portion of the URL; &browser.name; will automatically add it for you. For example, these two URLs both take you to the Java Software home page:

Furthermore, if the URL is a simple name containing only letters, numbers, and hyphens (that is, a name that does not contain any periods, slashes, colons, and so on), &browser.name; adds www. to the start of the name, and .com to the end of the name. It then adds the http:// to the front of the URL.

For example, if you type sun in the Address field, this gets expanded first to www.sun.com, then to http://www.sun.com, which saves you some typing.

https
This protocol works like the http protocol, except that it is used to retrieve documents from a secure server. This means that documents passed between your computer and the secure site are encrypted so that they cannot be read by any other sites, and that no other computer can pretend to be the secure site.

Note: This protocol does not work in versions of &browser.name; that do not support SSL (Secure Sockets Layer).

The lock that appears at the left of the message area appears locked when you're connected to a secure (https) site:

file
Use this protocol to display a local file. You need to specify the full path name of the file. You can omit the file: portion of the URL. For example, both of these URLs display the same file:
  • file:/mydirectory/myfile.txt
  • /mydirectory/myfile.txt

If you're loading an ASCII text file, the file must have one of the following extensions:

.text .txt .java .c .cc .c++ .h .pl .el

Note to Windows users:
To access a file on your C (or other) drive, start your URL with the string file:/c:/yourfile  or  /c:/yourfile.
If you want to list the contents of the C drive, use the URL file:/c:/.   or   /c:/..

If you type a URL that starts with "c:", you'll get an error message instead of a file listing from drive C. As described above, when a URL starts with a simple text string before a colon, the string is considered to be an Internet transfer protocol. Therefore, &browser.name; interprets a URL that starts with "c:" as if "c" is a protocol instead of a drive.

ftp
You can use &browser.name; to browse FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites. FTP sites are archives of files that you can download across the Internet. If the name of your FTP site starts with "ftp.", you can omit the ftp:// part of the URL; &browser.name; will automatically add it for you.

When you specify an FTP URL, &browser.name; displays the directories and files at the FTP site. Click a directory to go there, or click a file you want to see. If &browser.name; recognizes the file type, it displays the file. If &browser.name; doesn't recognize the file type, it displays a page you can use to save the file locally.

gopher
Gopher servers are similar to FTP servers, in that they are archives of files. To visit a Gopher site, type in the full URL or, if the server starts with "gopher.", you can omit the gopher:// portion of the URL.

mailto
To send email from &browser.name;, type mailto: email-address in the Address field and press Return or Enter. This displays the mail form in which you can compose your email message and send it. Alternatively, you can choose Send Mail from the File menu to access the mail form.

doc
You may notice that sometimes the address for a page displayed by &browser.name; starts with doc://.

This is a protocol that &browser.name; uses to locate specific &browser.name; files. It is not recognized by other browsers, and is therefore not useful for general web browsing.

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