Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
which was derived from the Mosaic idea. In fact, Mosaic was the first program
to produce a multimedia graphical user interface (GUI). 8.28
In the 1980s, CERN saw a clear and increasingneed for researchers, students,
and visitingscientists to quickly become conversant with the latest developments
in physics and information processing. CERN's project included the use of their
hardware and software to implement some elementary browsers for individual
users, at their workstations, who incorporated their ideas into the framework.
In March of 1989, the WWW was initiated as an information retrieval system
based upon the client-server model. To operate the scheme, the researchers at
CERN created a protocol named HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) a mea-
sure initiated to standardize server-client communications. The WWW browser
was oJcially released in January of 1992, and the acceptance of the WWW
was accelerated by the aforementioned creation of Mosaic. The WWW swiftly
ascended into the stratosphere in terms of the number of users.
The WWW allows users to access the universe of data all connected to each
other via hypertext (also called hypermedia links ) or simply hyperlinks , which
are electronic interconnections that tie together blocks of data permitting easy
access by users. The way this works is that hypertext is essentially an aspect of
a computer program permitting a user to choose a word or phrase and obtain
more data on it — a definition or related commentary within the text — for
example. Mosaic introduced this notion to the WWW to allow users to employ
the point-and-click option they had on their personal computers for some time.
For instance, point at the text “hypertext” at a WWW site, and one might
be taken to a document with comments on “hyperlinks”. This provides users
with instant access, cross-referencingto a lare array of linked relevant data
pertainingto their taret idea. It allows users to access small pieces of data at
any given time, digest it, and move on to more data through more links.
A hypertext document and its associated hyperlinks are written in HyperText
Markup Language , which comes with an assigned URL. The user may contribute
to the documents on the WWW by creatingtheir own homepage written in
HTML, which is a simple, easy-to-learn language. The user merely dictates the
structure and content they want on their site, and the detailed presentation and
extraction of information is left to the user's browser.
The future of the Internet is unbounded in terms of the features it may offer
us, as is the potential for hypertext in the WWW scheme. We are, in this new
millennium, on the verge of an explosion of information technology that will
rival the changes that the advent of the twentieth century produced. The dawn
of the twentieth century did not see the air and ground travel, which we now
take for granted, nor was it a computer-dominated world, without which our
own would collapse. What will the next century bringfor us?
8.28 A GUI refers to the use of pictures, as well as text, to display the output of a program.
This may be presented in the form of icons or buttons, for instance, which a user can control
via a mouse-controlled pointer. Although the concept of a GUI was conceived at Xerox's
PARC laboratory in the late 1970s, it was Apple with its Macintosh operating system that
first employed it in a computer for general use. The term multimedia refers to the interaction
between computer and user including graphics, text, video, speech, and often hypertext.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search