Introduction
The World Wide Web, the web, the internet--academic librarian Susan E. Beck has called it the cyber-home
of the good, the bad, and the ugly.1 Pages on the
web are as varied in
style, content, and quality as the
people who produce them.
Does that mean that no one is in charge of the internet? Yes, it does.
There are organizations, such as the World Wide web Consortium (W3C), which work
at developing technical standards for the web. But they have no authority
over content. What's confusing is that sometimes what looks good has ugly content.
And good content may be hidden behind an ugly exterior. What's an
enquiring mind to do? There are ways to evaluate web sites. One way to start
is to see where a web site is coming from. We'll explore that angle in a
moment.
 But
first, a distinction must be made: The "World Wide Web" is
not synonymous with the "internet." Of course, the web is a
major feature of the internet, but the internet also includes email,
chat, newsgroups, telephony (Voice over internet Protocol, or VoIP), etc. The
internet, a world-wide linking of
computers, is the matrix for these other elements. This tutorial will focus on the World Wide Web portion of the
internet.
How does the web work?
When you click on a web link, your PC becomes a client
asking for a file from a remote computer with a program called a
“server.” The server sends your PC the file(s), and then
disconnects once the file(s) are downloaded.
Right now you’re reading this web page as it has been cached on
your computer. You won’t be connected to the web again until you take some new
action—e.g. click on a link, select from your favorites, insert an address in the address block of your
browser and press enter, etc.
Almost all web pages are part of groups of web pages known as
“web sites.” Some web sites are subsets of larger web sites. For
example, the OCC Libraries
 web site is part of the larger Oakland
Community College web site. The individual pages link to each
other and to pages in other web sites through the magic of
hypertext: You click on a hyperlink, which says to a server,
send me another page (try
it―click here). And presto! It’s there! Usually.
If you have a problem with a link not opening in a new window because of a
pop-up blocker on your PC, try holding down the Control (Ctrl) button on your
keyboard when you click on the link.
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Next, you will see a table of contents for this tutorial. Then we'll proceed to
examine web addresses, and then "domains": i.e., where web sites come from.
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