Hypertext

gopher
World Wide Web
Directories
Search Engines
Web Rings

When most people think about the Internet, they think about the world wide web. In one way, that's not really fair, because there are so many other important tools, and the web is essentially a "Johnny-come-lately" application which came along after nearly everything else was already in place, and then hogged all the glory. But in another way, it is fair, because the web is the "killer app" which made the Internet so popular, by making it easy to use.

The reason that the web makes the Internet so easy to use is that it's hypertext. Hypertext is an idea which has been around for some years (Macintosh users may remember HyperCard, which used to come bundled with the Macintosh. It was another example of hypertext.) The basic concept of hypertext is that it uses the power of computers to turn a text document into something more than text that you need to read through form beginning to end. With hypertext, a word in a document can act as a "link" which leads to something else. For instance, within the Christian Telecommunications Toolkit web site, when you see a word or phrase in blue letters and underlined (like "killer app" in the last paragraph), you can click on it to be taken to a definition in the glossary. You don't need to flip through all the pages in the web site in turn to get to the glossary, but can click on a word and jump right to its definition. It is this ability to take text, which normally runs along in a linear fashion from beginning to end, and add another dimension to it, which gives hypertext its power. (The prefix "hyper" comes form the Greek word for "over", so hypertext is something which is over and above normal text.) I use it to provide instant access to definitions of telecommunications terms, but the ways to use hypertext to add functionality to a document are only limited by the imagination of the hypertext author. For instance, it is possible to create a hypertext Bible. Links could point to the original words in Hebrew or Greek, or forward to the next time a particular word is used in the text, or to biographical sketches of people, or maps of places, or to anything. In fact, one of the difficulties in writing hypertext documents is figuring out how to make it clear to the reader just what kind of resource a link will open up.

gopher

The earliest form of hypertext on the Internet was a utility called gopher. (Just as in the theatre, the term is a pun: the gopher's job is to "go-fer" things.) An author could use the gopher protocol to write a series of menus, each linking either to other menus, or to text pages. This made it possible to provide an easy way for users to navigate through large document repositories, and find what they need. Better still, a gopher menu can link to another gopher menu, even if it's on a different server. Thus, you can create a gopher menu which lists other gopher sites. It became reasonable to think that gopher might eventually provide a sort of "card catalogue" for the entire Internet, allowing a user to find files in the same way that a card catalogue in a library allows people to find books. People began to talk of all the interlinked gopher sites as "gopherspace." However, gopher has some limitations, which opened the way for a newer system come to prominence. For one thing, a gopher page could be a menu, or a document, but not both. In other words, it could either provide links to other gopher pages, or hold text, but it had to be one or the other. For another thing, the links on a gopher menu had to be text.

World Wide Web

The new version of hypertext was called the world wide web. With the web, any file could link to any other file, so a file could be a document, but still provide links to other documents. Then, too, a link could be any item on a page. Although the first generation of web browsers was text-only, Mosaic added the capability of having pictures on web pages, and not only that, but using pictures as navigation buttons. This paved the way for the web to become the single most common way of accessing Internet resources, because it provided a graphical user interface for the Internet that makes it easy to use. Now, the web really is the "card catalogue" for the entire Internet, except that anybody can create part of it. That means three things: First, there is no central authority to ensure that every resource on the Internet has a web page pointing to it. Second, there is no central authority ensuring the accuracy, or even legality of pages on the web, so the onus is on the user to try to determine whether the content on any given web page is accurate, mistaken, a hoax, or deliberate lies. Third, there is no central authority to catalogue all the web pages on the Internet, so it is up to users to find the resources they want. Some people find this anarchy liberating, because it allows true freedom of speech. Anybody who has something to say can put up a web page, and other users can choose whether to read it or not. Others find the same anarchy frustrating, because they don't know how to find what they want, nor do they know whether to trust what they find.

Directories

Early on in the development of the web, people realised that the number of web sites was growing far faster than anybody could keep track of, so people would put "Links Pages" on their web sites, pointing to other web sites they found interesting or useful, or which covered similar subjects of interest. Eventually, people began to create web sites which served as directories, having little or no content of their own, but listing large numbers of other web sites, divided up by topics. Nowadays, directories (and search engines) became among the most heavily-used parts of the web, as people use them to look for web sites on topics in which they are interested.

The disadvantage of a directory compared to a search engine is that people must examine web sites, and decide which topic or topics under which to list them. However, many users have come to prefer directories to search engines because that same editing process tends to weed out strictly commercial web sites (often pornographic sites) which use all kinds of tricks to get search engines to list them more prominently or frequently than they deserve. In fact, most directories refuse to list such sites at all.

There are several directory sites listed in Appendix C.

Search Engines

Because of the explosive growth in the number of web sites, and because people creating directories could not keep up with all the sorting and indexing, somebody came up with the idea of a search engine. Instead of having somebody manually sort through a web site, deciding what topic it falls under, the idea of a search engine is to index each web site, and keep a database listing all the words in every web site. Thus, a user can go to a web site and enter a search term like "blackberry", and see a list of every web page which has the word "blackberry" anywhere on it. In fact, most search engines not only index submitted pages, but also follow the links on each page as they index them, and then index the pages that they find on those links as well. Ideally, this should mean that eventually every web page will end up being listed on search engines eventually, but the web is so huge and growing so quickly that even the fastest indexing computers simply can't keep up. As of the year 2000, Northern Light, the search engine which had indexed the largest number of web pages, was estimated to have indexed only 16% of the total number of web pages available.

Search engines make it easy to find things, but the sheer size of the web means that you might get thousands of "hits", so most search engines allow you to be more specific. For instance, you might use the term "blackberry pie" to narrow down the number of hits to something more specific. Just about any search term you can think of will return hundreds or thousands of hits on any sizeable search engine, so the issue then becomes a matter of ranking the hits so that the pages you are most interested in will come first. On most search engines, the more terms you include, the more accurate the ranking will be, since the search engine will be able to include pages which have a lot of the terms you a looking for above those which only have a few. (For instance, if you use a search expression like "blackberry pie crumble pudding recipes", then pages with recipes for blackberry pie will tend to be ranked fairly highly. On the other hand, if you just use a search expression of "blackberry", then the search engine would be just as likely to return pages discussing Research In Motion's Blackberry portable E-mail terminal as pages with the recipe you're looking for.)

There are several search engines listed in Appendix C.

Web Rings

Just as people's early "Links Pages" developed into directories, they also developed into the concept of the Web Ring, in which a group of people whose web sites all had some interest in common would provide links to a central server. That server would keep track of the web sites in the ring, so that a user could click on a "Next" button on one web site, and be taken to the next web site in the web ring. The theory is that people who are interested in the topic of one web site might also be interested in another web site on the same topic.

Unfortunately, even this simple concept has flaws, as web sites might shut down, or change topic, or change servers, and so web rings can get broken easily. (This is why most web ring banners have commands like "Skip Next" or "List Sites." That way, you can keep exploring a web ring, even after you encounter a break, by returning to the last intact link and then skipping over the break.) Then too, just because web sites are on the same topic will not necessarily mean that they are of comparable quality, nor will all the web sites which might be related to a particular subject necessarily be in a web ring. Still, web rings are a quick way to sample a number of web sites on a subject. One server where you can search for web rings on a number of subjects is WebRing.com.

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