Entering the world-wide web: a guide to cyberspace

Wha t is the Wor ld-Wide Web? For fifty years, people have dreamt of the concept of a universal information database--data that would not only be accessible to people around the world, but information that would link easily to other pieces of information so that only the most important data would be quickly found by a user. It was in the 1960's when this idea was explored further, giving rise to visions of a "docuverse" that people could swim through, revolutionizing all aspects of human-information interaction, particularly in the educational field. Only now has the technology caught up with these dreams, making it possible to implement them on a global scale. The official description of the World-Wide Web is a "wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents." What the World-Wide Web (WWW, W3) project has done is provide users on computer networks with a consistent means to access a variety of media in a simplified fashion. Using a popular software interface to the Web called Mosaic, the Web project has changed the way people view and create information--it has created the first true global hypermedia network.