What's a Browser?

What’s a Browser?

You read the World Wide Web by using a browser. If you use X Windows, you can use a graphical browser such as Mozilla, Konqueror, or Opera. With a graphical browser, you get to see all the cool stuff as well as the text. (Does this type of browser make the browsing experience any more educational or enriching? In some cases, maybe, but mostly it just makes browsing more fun.) If you’re familiar with a browser on Windows, you’ll find browsing on UNIX quite familiar, and if you use Mozilla, Netscape, or Opera on Windows, you’ll find their UNIX versions nearly identical. This chapter describes both Mozilla and Konqueror.

�Technical Stuff�� URL!

The World Wide Web brought us the extremely useful concept of Uniform Resource Locators, or URLs. The point of a URL is to have a simple and consistent way to name Internet resources that tells you both the type of the resource and where to find it. A URL consists of a resource type, a colon, and a location. URLs look horrendous. In most cases, the location is two slashes, the host name where the resource can be found, a slash, and a filename on that host.

Commonly used resource types are shown in this list:

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  http: A HyperText Transfer Protocol document; that is, something in native Web format

  
  


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  ftp: A directory or file on an FTP server

  
  

Here’s a typical URL:

http://net.gurus.com/toc-u4d5.html

The reason that most URLs look more like run-on typos than actual locations is that they were originally designed to be read by computers rather than actual human beings. Still, their structure has an underlying order, and understanding that order helps to demystify them (a little). The sample URL is a Web document. Reading backward, the part after the last slash is the filename: toc-u4d5.html. The part following the two slashes is the host name of the computer: net.gurus.com. Finally, back at the beginning, you see http:, which just tells the browser to use the http resource type (the Web) to view this file.

Although URLs were originally intended as a way for computers to pass around resource names, they’ve also become widely used as a way to tell people about Internet resources, and that’s how we use them in this section of the book. It’s unfortunate that they’re so difficult to type!

When you start your browser, you can begin with the Web page it suggests and find your way to the information you want by following the hypertext links. (Don’t worry — we tell you how.) Alternatively, you can jump directly to a Web page if you know its name. These names are called URLs (for Uniform Resource Locators) — see the nearby sidebar, “URL!” to read about them.