2 Viewing pages

Viewing different pages on the Net.

In the tasks to come a blank page is used as the default page. If you have a different page as default page it doesn't matter for now although some of the figures will look a little different.

Let's suppose that we want to view the home page of the New York Public Library. We know already that this can be achieved by typing into the Location Box of a browser the string:

nypl.org.

Firstly, we must set the browser to work.

1     Start IE6.

2    Type the URL into the Location Box of the browser as shown in
Figure 2-1 above.

3     Press Enter.

Here we see the so-called home page of the New York Public Library. In the Location Box can be seen the URL of the page. Note that a slash '/' is added after the URL you typed. That slash means a root directory of the web server. The home page is stored in the root directory.

Now let's try this string:

               bbcnews.com/

4     Enter 'bbcnews.com/' in the Location Box and press Enter.

Now in the Location Box you see that the URL is actually:

               http://news.bbc.co.uk/

That is the current URL of the page but the page is also achieved using the string'bbcnews.com' because it is also registered for the page. So it doesn't matter which of them you type as the root folder of the web server hosting the web pages of BBC News is achieved using either of them.

In the examples we have encountered so far it's quite obvious where the web servers may physically or geographically exist. Perhaps the server machine for the New York Public Library is somewhere in the City of New York and the server machine of BBC somewhere in the UK. But what about this one:

dmoz.org

Where do you think the server for this might be situated? If you don't know, it's not a problem. We can still see if the home page is achievable.

5     Enter 'dmoz.org/' in the Location Box:

6     Press Enter.

Here is the home page of Open Directory Project, a large human-edited directory of the Web.

You can find more information about Open Directory Project by following the hyperlink 'about dmoz' in the upper side of the page. When you move the mouse cursor over a hyperlink it changes to a hand. By clicking the hyperlink 'about dmoz' you'll see something as shown in Figure 2-7 below:

Now the URL of this page is

               http://dmoz.org/about.html

A hyperlink hides the URL of a page. When the hyperlink was clicked, the URL behind it was passed to the browser. Then the browser sent the request to the web server and the web server returned the page to the browser to be displayed.

So, when you click a hyperlink, the URL behind it is sent to the web server by the browser. You'll just skip typing the URL yourself when you click a hyperlink.

That's fine so far but we still don't know where the machine of the web server hosting these pages is running. But is that important to know at all? In order to use the pages it doesn't matter in the slightest to know where the server is situated geographically. The web server hosting the pages simply exists 'somewhere on the Net'. And that's all it needs to know.

So in order to get a page to a browser it's enough to know

§       that the page in question is available somewhere 'on the Net'

§       the URL of the page / a hyperlink to click to get the page.

Now when we have visited several pages it is convenient for the browser to remember the URL of those pages in case we want to return to them. Let's look at that next.

7    Click the arrow in the Location Box as shown in Figure 2-8 below:

8    Choose the address 'http://nypl.org/' as shown in Figure 2-8 above.

9    Do your own experiments with different URLs and hyperlinks if you wish. For example, you can study what kind of hyperlinks there are to be followed on the following home pages:

●         unicef.org

●         googlesightseeing.com