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EE1030
Introduction to UNIX
Salt Lake Community College
Department of Engineering
(Electrical Engineering) MHM

ASSIGNMENT #6 Netscape/Explorer and the web

Netscape /Explorer and the Web

Netscape and Explorer are the two most popular Web browsers .
In room SI060 both icons for Netscape and Explorer are available
In room SI075 just Explorer icon is availabe
If you do not have Netscape at home ( assuming you have IP) , you can load it by typing
http://www.netscape.com/ In the address section of Explorer. Drag it in windows to have an icon
for the ease of use.
In room SIo60
Try: Click on Explorer icon ( Do not copy, just comment on the appearance of the two title bars)
Now
Try: Click on Netscape icon ( Do not copy, just comment on the appearance of the two title bars)

In this lesson we will discuss using Netscape to explore the World Wide Web. You may do just
about the same thing using Explorer with little adjustment in words.

The World Wide Web (‘‘WWW’’ or ‘‘The Web’’ for short) is perhaps the most important aspect
of the Internet today. It provides an easy and powerful method of accessing information.

Netscape’s main function is to retrieve files from other computers on the Internet. Most files that
you view using Netscape will be HTML files. This stands for ‘‘Hyper Text Markup Language,’’
and specifies files that contain formatted text with embedded pictures and links to other files.
Any kind of file, however, can be retrieved, though you may not be able to view it using
Netscape.

Netscape cannot retrieve just any file that exists on a computer on the Internet. Only files that
have been deliberately placed in places where Netscape can access them can be retrieved.
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Anybody on the Internet with an account on a machine that provides WWW services can place
information on the Web. The College of Engineering computers do provide WWW services, and
you will learn how to place information on the Web in a future lesson.

The files that you retrieve and view with the Netscape program are usually referred to as ‘‘pages.’’
It is a common thing for individuals, businesses, universities and other organizations to create a
page that gives information about themselves, and provides links to any other information they
want distributed on the Web. Also, pages are often created about a specific topic, with links to
other pages containing specific information about that topic. These pages are usually known as
‘‘home pages.’’

An Important Note
If you are already running Netscape, you should not start up another copy of Netscape. If you try,
a window will pop up containing a message similar to this:
Netscape has detected a /home/smatrpe/.netscape/lock file.

You may continue to use Netscape, but you will be unable to use the
disk cache, global history, or your personal certificates.

Otherwise, you may choose Cancel, make sure that you are not running
another Netscape Navigator, delete the /home/smartpe/.netscape/lock
file, and restart Netscape.
If you ever get this message, do one of two things:

If you already have Netscape running, use it! If you want another Netscape window so that
you can see two documents are once, simply pull down the ‘‘File’’ menu and choose
‘‘New’’ and then ‘‘Navigator Window.’’

Netscape Basics
By now you have had some practice in moving around using Netscape. There are links embedded in
the text of the pages that you can click on. These links each have an address attached to them,
known as a ‘‘URL,’’ that specifies what page to go to. We will discuss URLs in the next section.
These links show up as underlined text, usually in a different color than the normal text. The
default colors are black for regular text, blue for links to pages that you haven’t been to recently,
and purple for links to pages that you have been to recently, but these colors can be changed.
Netscape remembers what pages you have visited during a certain period of time, usually the last
10 days, but this can be changed as well.

Netscape also remembers what pages you have visited during the current session. You can see a list
of these pages by looking at the ‘‘Go’’ menu. The list of menu items in the bottom section of the
menu are the titles of the pages that you have visited. The familiar ‘‘Back’’ and ‘‘Forward’’
buttons on the Netscape toolbar move back and forward through this list. You can go directly to
one of the pages on the list by selecting the corresponding menu item.

Under the ‘‘Tools’’ submenu of the ‘‘Communicator’’ menu, you can also select the ‘‘History’’ item to
open a window that contains a list of all of the pages that you have visited lately. You can visit a
page by double clicking on its name. Select ‘‘Close’’ under the ‘‘File’’ menu to close the history
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window.

If Netscape is in the middle of loading a page and you want it to stop, you can click on the ‘‘Stop’’
button from the toolbar. You might want to do this if the page is taking too long to load.

URLs
If you look near the top of your Netscape window, you will see a box labeled ‘‘Location.’’ In this box
is a piece of information that tells you what page is displayed. This piece of information is known
as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). It is important to understand how URLs are constructed,
because they provide a unique address for a particular page, allowing you access that page from
anywhere without having its link already built in to a page, ready for clicking. URLs are similar
to UNIX filenames, but they also include information about which machine on the Internet
contains the file.

The first part of the URL is sometimes known as the prefix, and includes everything up to the first
colon. It provides some information to Netscape about how to go about retrieving the page. This
part will usually be ‘‘http’’ (which stands for ‘‘Hyper Text Transfer Protocol’’) but can be
different. Some other prefixes include ‘‘ftp,’’ ‘‘gopher,’’ ‘‘news,’’ ‘‘telnet,’’ and ‘‘mailto.’’

The next part of the URL is the machine name. This includes everything between the double slashes
and the first single slash. Every computer that is attached to the Internet has an address to tell
other computers on the Internet how to connect to it. This address is a bunch of numbers, but
most addresses have a symbolic representation that is much more informative to a human user
than the address that the computer actually uses. These names are composed of several words
separated by periods, and uniquely identify a particular computer on the Internet. E-mail
addresses have a user name, followed by a ‘‘@’’, followed by a machine name. An example of a
machine name is ‘‘www.cs.utah.edu’’ which is the same as ‘‘155.99.170.51’’. The first one is
obviously much easier to use.

The rest of the URL is the path and filename of the page. This is almost identical to the Unix
filenames you have already learned about. Sometimes there won’t be a specific file name, and the
URL will end right after the machine name. This will take you to the home page for that
machine. For example, the URL ‘‘http://www.coe.utah.edu/’’ will take you to the U of U College
of Engineering home page, because the machine ‘‘www.eng.utah.edu’’ is the engineering
college’s web server.
To view a page by using its URL, choose ‘‘Open Page...’’ under the ‘‘File’’ menu. Then type the URL
into the box in the window that appears, and click on ‘‘Open In Navigator’’. Make sure you type
the URL in exactly as it is shown. Here’s a sample URL that you can try out (it is the world news
page of the CNN website; you don’t need to read it):
Try:http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/ (Do not copy, Comment)
You can also open a specific URL by clicking in the box labeled ‘‘Location’’ and typing the URL
there, then pressing Enter. This is especially useful when the new URL is very similar to the
current one.

Some URLs might have some extra information appended after the pathname of the file. This
information is usually separated from the filename by a special character such as ‘‘#’’ or ‘‘?’’. This
provides things such as a specific place to go to in a page, or information that you provided by
filling out a form.
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You have probably noticed by now that when you point the mouse cursor at a link in a page,
Netscape displays a URL in the status line at the bottom of the window. This URL is the address
of the page which the link will take you to, if you click on it.

Try: http://www.slcc.edu ( Do not copy, Comment)

External Viewers
Netscape can only display a few types of files: HTML files (.html), pictures (.gif and .jpg), and
plain text. Yet any type of file can be retrieved over the Web, so Netscape has a way of passing
the files it doesn’t understand to other programs. These other programs are called external
viewers.

Here are some files that can be viewed by Netscape:

a plain text file

a .jpg image file
a .gif image file

Here is a file that uses an external viewer:

a postscript file

By default, when Netscape doesn’t know what program to run for a particular file, it asks you if you
want to save the file to disk. Here’s an example of a file Netscape doesn’t know what to do with:

a binary file

Bookmarks
Netscape provides an easy way to return to a specific page besides remembering or writing down the
URL. You can create a bookmark which will allow you to return to a page by selecting an item
from a menu.

Take a look at the ‘‘Bookmarks’’ menu. The first item, ‘‘Add Bookmark’’, allows you to add
bookmarks to your bookmarks list To add a bookmark that points to the currently displayed page,
just select ‘‘Add Bookmark.’’ Try this now. Look at the menu again. What happened?

Try: Add bookmarks (Just go through the above, add some bookmarks, comment)

You can now return to this page at any time by selecting the ‘‘Bookmarks’’ menu item. You can try
this out by moving to a different page (for example, by clicking the ‘‘Back’’ button), then
selecting the menu item.

Bookmark List Editing. Netscape also has some facilities for editing the bookmark list. This can be
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found as the ‘‘Edit Bookmarks...’’ option under the ‘‘Bookmarks’’ menu.

Selecting ‘‘Edit Bookmarks...’’ brings up another window. We won’t get into the finer details of this
window here, but its hierarchical format can be very useful if you have a large number of
bookmarks that you want to manage. You can delete bookmarks, create folders, nest bookmarks
inside folders, and drag bookmarks around at will. If you do this, the bookmarks menu itself will
reflect the hierarchical organization of your bookmarks list.

Other Netscape Features

If you are using Netscape over a slow modem link, it can take a long time to download images. If
this the case, you can tell Netscape not to download them automatically. To turn off automatic
image loading, select ‘‘Preferences...’’ under the ‘‘Edit’’ menu. A new window will appear. Click
on ‘‘Advanced’’ and then click on the box whose label begins ‘‘Automatically load images’’. Then
click on OK.

After you have disabled automatic image loading, Netscape will display an icon in the place of each
image. You can selectively download an image by clicking on its icon. You can restore automatic
image loading by returning to the window described above and clicking on the box again.

If the information displayed by Netscape needs to be redrawn for any reason, select the ‘‘Refresh’’
option from the ‘‘View’’ menu. If the page that you are viewing uses Netscape frames to divide
the browser window (the page that you are looking at has the navigation bar in one frame and this
text in another) the frame in which you have most recently clicked will be refreshed.

‘‘Refresh’’ refreshes the Netscape display using information previously downloaded from the Web.
Clicking on the ‘‘Reload’’ button, in contrast, will cause Netscape to obtain a fresh copy of the
page from the Web before redisplaying it. This can be useful if you interrupted the downloading
of a page and now want to try again.

The ‘‘Page Source’’ option in the ‘‘View’’ menu will open a window that displays the HTML source
of the current page. You will learn more about HTML files in a later lesson. ‘‘Page Info,’’ the
item immediately beneath ‘‘Page Source,’’ brings up some specialized information about the
HTML document currently being viewed.

Now select the ‘‘Find in Frame’’ option under the ‘‘Edit’’ menu. This will bring up a window that
allows you to search the current frame for specific words. If you enter a word or phrase in the
white box and then click on ‘‘Find’’, Netscape will highlight the next occurrence of that word or
phrase.

The ‘‘New’’ option under the ‘‘File’’ menu allows you, among other things, to open a new Netscape
Navigator window so you can look at more than one page at a time. The ‘‘Send Page’’ and ‘‘Send
Link’’ options allow you to email the contents and the URL, respectively, of the current page to
yourself or someone else. The ‘‘Print Frame’’ option will send a copy of the current frame to a
printer. The ‘‘Close’’ option closes the browser window, and the ‘‘Exit’’ option terminates
Netscape altogether.
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Web Search Services

The Web provides an incredible variety of information and services. The only hard part is finding
exactly what you want. Fortunately, there are many different search engines available that can
search for pages based on keywords that you provide.

So that you can continue reading this lesson while experimenting with a search engine, open up a
new Navigator Window by using the ‘‘Navigator Window’’ option under the ‘‘New’’ submenu of
the ‘‘File’’ menu. In the new window, you can access a list of some of the most popular search
engines by selecting the ‘‘Search Internet’’ option from the ‘‘Edit’’ menu. Although this page will
no doubt change over time, it currently displays links to nine different general-purpose search
engines and a host of more specific ones. You can choose which of the general-purpose search
engines to use by clicking on its name. While every search engine behaves slightly differently,
they all have similarities. For concreteness, we will describe the behavior of the ‘‘Netscape’’
search engine below.

You will see a rectangular text-entry box labeled ‘‘Search the Web’’. Let’s suppose you want to find
some information about dog grooming equipment. Click in the text-entry box, type ‘‘dog’’, and
click on the ‘‘Search’’ button. This search will yield a list of web site categories (135 on the day
we tried) and a list of reviewed web sites (2087 on the day we tried). Fortunately, you can make
the search more specific.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and change the search key from ‘‘dog’’ to ‘‘dog AND grooming’’ and
clicking on the ‘‘Search Again’’. This will narrow the search to pages that deal with both dogs
and grooming. The day that we tried it out, the search engine yielded 6 categories and 44 web
sites. When we changed the search key to ‘‘dog AND grooming AND equipment,’’ only two web
sites were reported. At any point in a search, you can visit any of the matches by clicking as
usual.

The trick to successful searching is in choosing the keywords for your search. If you aren’t specific
enough you will get hundreds or thousands of pages, but if you are too specific, you might not get
any pages at all. It is usually best to start with a general keyword and to gradually narrow it
down. You can typically use connectives like ‘‘AND’’ and ‘‘OR’’ to connect your keywords, but
the behavior varies among search engines. Each search service provides its own documentation
(typically a ‘‘Help’’ link), and it is often a good idea to see what the service says about how to
effectively conduct a search using its engine.

Another way to find information on a particular topic is to use one of the many indices available.
Instead of searching for key words, these pages provide a list of different topics, such as
‘‘Science’’ or ‘‘Computers.’’ Under each topic, there is usually a list of more specific topics. For
example, under ‘‘Science’’ there might be ‘‘Biology’’ and ‘‘Chemistry.’’ You can find one list of
indices on the initial ‘‘Search Internet’’ page.

One thing to keep in mind is that even if a particular page doesn’t have the information that you need,
it will often have links to other pages that do. Finding a certain bit of information usually
requires some exploring.
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More Information
If you would like a more information about using Netscape, you can select the ‘‘Help’’ item under the
‘‘Help’’ menu in Netscape. This will open a window that provides a large body of information
about the Netscape browser.

Try: The following , and comment in your Document file)

Find a Web page containing some general information about each of the following topics, and make
a bookmark to that page:

Computer Games

Income Taxes

Poetry

Special Education

Political Science

University of Utah Class Schedule

Salt Lake Community College Catalog
Salt Lake Community College Class schedule