What is the best way to find anything on the internet?
Answer :
The Whole Internet User's Guide And Catalog
By Ed Kroll
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Publishers
103 Morris Street, Suite A
Sebastopol, California 95472
Phone (800) 338-6887
FAX (707) 829-0104
List price is $24.95.
====== Book review by Dan DeMaggio (dmag@umich.edu) =====
If you want concentrated, comprehensive information about finding things on
the Internet, you will want to look into this book.
As the title implies, it is both a Users Guide and a catalog. In the first
part, he explains how to use utilities like FTP, Telnet, WAIS, WWW, Gopher,
etc. In the second part, he lists resources you can get to (using these
utilities) by topic. For instance, it has listings for Space, Bikes, Teaching,
etc. Each one list mail-groups, servers, FTP sites, etc that are devoted or
include that topic. Most of these resources are free.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wikipedia :
Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog
The World Wide Web
In the May 1993 edition, the World Wide Web was described in terms of Gopher protocol:
In Chapter 14, Hypertext Spanning the Internet:WWW, we'll discuss ...The World Wide Web. On the surface, the Web looks like a variation on GOPHER (p. 189).
In addition, Krol notes:
The World Wide Web or WWW, is the newest information service to arrive on the Internet. The Web is based on a technology called hypertext....Like GOPHER and WAIS, the Web is very much under development, perhaps even more so. So don't be surprised if it doesn't occasionally work the way you'd like. It's certainly worth playing with (p. 227).
[edit]The Web v. Gopher
Krol compares the Web and Gopher, stating:
The Web and Gopher: You may be asking yourself what is so great about this. After all, what we've done so far isn't all that different from what you can do with Gopher. The Web appears to have a subject-oriented flavor, which is an advantage, but at first glance, it doesn't seem fundamentally different. That's not really true though. While there are a lot of similarities, the Web and Gopher differ in several ways. First, the Web is based on hypertext documents, and is structured by links between pages of hypertext. (231).
He further notes:
The Gopher just isn't as flexible. Its presentation is based on individual resources and servers...the web eliminates the barrier between your data and "public data" ... Ten years ago, a few dozen boxes full of index cards was de rigueur for anyone writing a dissertation or an academic book. With the Web, a few hypertext documents make that all obsolete (232).
[edit]Browsers
While Krol notes that a number of web browser options exist, he highlights ViolaWWW stating that, "The one called Viola or 'ViolaWWW' is probably the most feature rich" (p.227).
[edit]Hypertext editors
At the time of publication, HTML editors or "hypertext editors" were rare. Krol states:
Hypertext Editors: At this time, hypertext editors, which are needed to take full advantage of the Web, are scarce. The WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXT workstation incorporates a hypertext editor; the ViolaWWW browser will eventually add a hypertext editor. For the moment, if you don't have a NeXT, you're out of luck. If you poke around in the online help long enough, you'll find a description of HTML, the markup language. If you're really bold, you can create hypertext 'by hand.' But that's beyond the scope of this book. We expect that use of the Web will really explode once hypertext editors are available. For the moment, though, its hobbled by the lack of editors (p. 241).
================================================================================
The drought before Google
