Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Overall, our interactions with the World Wide Web involve the
communication of much information. In this chapter, we'll explore
what records are kept of our work, what materials are public or pri
vate, and how secure various pieces of information might be.
Understanding these important topics can help shape how carefully
you interact with the Web. Feel free to investigate them further by
reading the latest publications on the Web. It's a controversial and
popular subject that is bound to intrigue you.
server and back?
To begin, let's look carefully at the information we supply in
our browser when requesting a Web page; these exchanges can po
tentially compromise our privacy, as you'll soon see. A simple ex
ample of a request for a Web site might be:
Such an expression is called a
Uniform Resource Locator
(URL)
, and it provides a primary format for specifying Web pages
on the World Wide Web. The URL acts as the directions to the Web
site's address, and when you hit Return, the network forwards these
directions to the server about the file that you're looking for. As we
have discussed before in Chapters 9 and 11, we can decipher ele
ments of this URL as follows:
http:// Tells your browser and the Web server to use the
Hypertext Transfer Protocol for the transmission of
this material from the Web server to the browser.
www.cs.grinnell.edu
Specifies the domain name for the Web
server for the computer science program at Grinnell
College.
~walker/fluencybook Indicates that the document is located
in the fluencybook subdirectory of Walker's Web
directory.
webinfo.php Identifies the name of the file itself (that happens
to be written in a scripting language called PHP rather
than in HTML).
