A Mug’s Guide to Using Computers Ghapter 3: Usieg the Interaot The Intemet is wonderful research tool, and using it can really help you find the information you want. But first, you should get to grips with the basics. The first thing to do is to start your web browser, which is a program that lets you view Internet pages (also called web pages). These are not like pages in a book—they are all different sizes and don’t have numbers—really they are documents on the Internet. The most popular browsers are called Navigator and Explorer. Find the icon (remember what that is—a little picture) on the screen which has one of these names next to it and double click. Then. the program opens! If you get a strange error message, don’t worry. It probably means you're not connected to the Internet. Just ask someone who knows about computers, or jump to Chapter 16.of this book. But if not, that's great! Now, find a box iabelted ‘Location’ or Address. Inside the box, you'l find some strange gibberish starting with ‘www. This stands for the World Wide Web, one of the most common ways of using the Internet. It is usually just called ‘the web” because computer people hate using long words. It is a vast collection of information ‘on millions of computers all around the world, most of which can be accessed from your computer, right now! Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it! So, smarty-pants, how do we access all this information, I hear you ask? Well, TUl show you. In the box, type a web address (for example, wwivi.bbc.co.uk) and press the enter key on your keyboard. And, hey presto, before tong, youll see. the home page of guess what? The BBC from the UK, of course! So, how'could sou guess the organisation so easily? Because the web address usually gives-us lots of information about what the website is. Working from right to left, that is, backwards for English speakers, the first thing we see is ‘uk. This of course, indicates the country. Most countries have a two letter code, for example, Australia is ‘au’ and China is ‘cn’, But be careful—this doesn’t always truthfully show you the country of origin. For example, a little group of islands in the South Pacific has made bags of money recently because its code is ‘t”—so of course TV companies have paid millions to use the code. And you'll find many websites which don’t have these letters ... mostly from the USA. I wonder why that happened??! By the way, if you want to impress your friends, you can tell them that web addresses are technically known as URLs, which stands for “Uniform Resource Locaters. Sounds like something to help a soldier who's lost his clothes! Going further backwards, the next letters show (or at least pretend to show) the kind of organisation which ‘owns’ the site, You can see what these mean in table 1, 20 35Table 1: Meanings of some common top level domain names Abbreviations in Abbreviations in | countries which ike countries which Meaning longer words like shorter words Educational/academic edu ac Organisations (usually non-profit organisations) org org Network service providers (the companies through which you connect to the internet) _ snet ane. 4 Companies com 0 Government, including local government gov .gov After that are some letters for the name of the organisation, or whatever the ‘omer chooses—for example, www.doggiecatcher.com—try it—it really exists! By the way, this name, in this case ‘doggiecatcher’, is often called a ‘domain name’, though technically “com’ and the country codes are also domain names. Anything after a slash (//) refers to file names and folder names of pages of the Website, a little bit like the way you save word processing files. So)’now that we know what web addresses mean, let's move on to how to use the site: Look again at the screen. What you can see is the ‘home page’, that js, miain document; of the website. From here you should be able to get to every section of the website. How? Well, there should be lots of underlined words on this page. It means that if you click:on: one of these, you'll be transported to another page, that is, ther document. Do it! The website is feally just a collection of pages like: this one, connected together with hyperlinks, which are the underlined words tike the one you just clicked on. Again, computer people dislike long words so ‘they shorten this to-‘link. Clicking on a link is called ‘following a link, and doing this several times means you're ‘navigating’ the web, or, if you have no particular piirpose, ‘surfing the net’. Congratulations-on your new skill So, how are home pages organised? Well, they vary but usually the main links ‘are down the left hand side or along the top. These take you directly to the different sections of the site. Sometimes there will be a separate side panel, or a frame, with these main links: When you-go to another page, often this panel stays the same, This will help you find the information you want quickly. A very useful trick is to use the right mouse button. Doing this. is known as ‘right clicking’ and when you do it, you'll see a little menu of items appear like fa genie from a magic lantern. Without touching the mouse buttons, move the mouse up slowly until you come to something saying ‘Open in New Window’, 40 50then click on this. A new window will open, and you can move between windows 65 in the normal way as mentioned in the previous chapter. This is great if you have a slow Internet connection, because instead of waiting for a page to open, vali can’be reading one while another is opening. Saves a lot of time!