Using the World Wide Web - a Guide For Graduate Students

Introduction

This document has been produced primarily for the seminar on the Internet and the World Wide Web, for graduate students in the Crystallography Department of Birkbeck College. It is intended as an introduction to how students in this department can usefully use "The Web" in their studies.

What if I'm a complete beginner?

These pages aren't intended to be an introduction to the Internet or World Wide Web itself; if this is the first time you are using a browser (the package such as Netscape or Mosaic which is displaying this page of hypertext), and you need help in using hypertext, place the cursor over this blue text (called a hyperlink) and press the left mouse button.

For an Introduction to Network Resources to explain what the Internet is, click here.

You should also look at Birkbeck Crystallography's Internet Tutorial , written by Sami Raza.

And Internet for everyone will tell you everything you need to know. You have to register, but its free.

So what can we use this Web-thing for?

This will be illustrated with some examples.

First, the bad news-

Note: After you've clicked on a "hyperlink", the speed of response can vary greatly. The click initiates a request for a particular page of hypertext to the server at the site at which the page is stored. The server is the program (and confusingly, also the computer on which it runs) which accepts requests and responds with the appropriate files. So the response time depends on

how far away the server is
how good the connection to the server is; how quickly the information reaches you is determined by the worst link in the chain of internet connections- some media such as optical fibres can carry a lot of data very quickly compared to others
how many other people around the world are currently trying to access the same site, and the state of network traffic in general
whether the server you are trying to contact is actually working at the moment

When you try and follow some of the links in the examples, its possible that you won't be able to make a connection at all (more likely with servers in other continents) or that even if you do, not all of the hypertext file will be delivered ("downloaded"). This may apply to images within the document; if you get bored with waiting for a document to load, you can always click on the Stop button (in Netscape; in Mosaic, click on the spinning globe). Individual images which have not been or cannot be downloaded at all will be displayed something like this:

The (sometimes long) delays while information is fetched is the bad bit about the World Wide Web, which they don't always tell you about.

Now the examples; you may find it easier to have more than one browser window running simultaneously.