Introduction

One of the easiest ways to find information on the Internet is to use the World Wide Web (WWW). Invented at CERN (the European Centre for Particle Physics in Geneva), the web was first developed to allow people working on different types of computers (ranging from mainframes to workstations) to publish and read documents on many of the networked computers at CERN. 

The web uses hypertext files that appear to a user as readable pages on the screen. These pages contain highlighted “clickable links” that are part of a navigation system. By clicking on a link, presented as highlighted text or a picture, a new document or a new section of the current page or document, will appear. 

Rapid growth and the continual evolution of the web’s capabilities arrived from the ability to view documents and images from all over the world with the appropriate software and also the easy navigation between documents, using hypertext links. You now enjoy graphics, sound video and animation with a click of the mouse. Multimedia adds new dimensions to the information available on the web and the introduction of the plug-ins, Flash, and other technologies increased the user’s ability to interact with the creators of the web pages through myriad applications. All you need is a good Internet connection and the appropriate software and hardware. This sophisticated communication between computers and the people who use them continues to evolve as computer programs can be executed directly inside web pages.

Access to the Web From Ryerson

To access the web you need an Internet connection and a web browser application. Ryerson’s CCS labs use Mozilla Firefox and Windows Internet Explorer, and are available in LIB393, LIB386L, KHW377, KHW379 and all KHW71 and TRS labs. Faculty and Staff may access the browsers from their offices, see the table below.

Mozilla SeaMonkey, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer are also available for your home computer. To obtain Mozilla SeaMonkey and Mozilla Firefox, please go to http://www.mozilla.org. Whereas the Mozilla SeaMonkey package brings the browser and E-mail applications, Mozilla Firefox only includes the browser. To download Internet Explorer, please go to http://www.microsoft.com. 

In this section, in addition to a basic concept of a World Wide Web, we provide usage instructions on Mozilla Firefox and Windows Internet Explorer, and Search engines.

Internet Browsers

To explore the world-wide-web, you will require an internet browser to manage and display data visually. There are numerous browsers available for free and each operating system comes with their own default browser. Choosing a browser depends entirely on personal preference, although it should be noted that Ryerson recommends either Internet Explorer or Firefox for use on Blackboard.