When human beings are searching for information, whether in print or through verbal communication with others, we tend to explore the first resource that comes to hand, looking for any clue toward finding a more germane reference, ultimately following a chain of related resources until the answer sought is found. Publishers have long recognized this and the value of indexing, footnoting, and cross-referencing as aids to their readers.
The World Wide Web represents the technological realization of this style of pursuit, and so brings the huge body of knowledge on the Internet to hand in a very natural, familiar way.
This document is intended as an introduction to the kinds of interactions possible with Web browsers, including jumping off points to exceptional WWW sites which exemplify certain features being used by information providers using the Web.
A wide variety of web browsers exist, and they communicate with a variety of information servers. Marc Salomon of UCSF has assembled a very clear summary of the pieces that make up the web. As the diagram indicates, a web browser such as Mosaic or Lynx can present to the user information from an http server, a gopher server, an anonymous ftp server, or even just browse the local filesystem (within flexible server configuration security limits.) Of course, one can also open a simple telnet session.
One of the most attention-getting features of information on the web is its multimedia capability. Images, sounds, animations, and visually appealing formatted documents abound. There are even interactive images.
Not only does the Web support multimedia documents, but it supports hypermedia documents -- i.e., documents which can refer to one another with hypertext links. This is, in fact, what makes the Web a web.
But, you point out, it's bad enough trying to navigate a gopher tree with links to other sites -- given the lack of structure connecting documents on the Web, how does one find things? As it happens, every document on the Web has a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), a simple formalism for uniquely describing the "address" of a given network information resource. In other words, one can use the URL to jump straight to any given document. Many browsers (including Mosaic) will inform you of the URL of the document you are examining, and indeed, the URL associated with any link within that document.
So what price is associated with all this functionality? Does it take a degree in Rocket Science to produce Web documents? Not at all. Documents are "marked up" in a standard language (HTML: HyperText Markup Language) which is truly easy to use. Points within the document which require special processing (a link, text formatting, a form element...) are surrounded by brief, intelligible markup strings. The Antweb home page provides a good example of HTML and its simplicity.
The most powerful feature within the current definition of HTML is "fill-out forms". With these, one can get input from a user, and use that input in the context of a wide variety of applications -- even applications not traditionally considered network resources -- to produce an amazing variety of information services. Here, for example, is a form created by a UCI faculty member for communication with his students.
Finally, how does this all fit within the context of a University, with its various departments, service organizations, and information sources (such as CWIS)? Many campuses have begun to use the web to publish information both to the world, and internally. Stanford has a document describing "residential computing" -- how to connect to Stanford's computing resources from within the dorms.
One university that has impressed us with the scope, professional presentation, and usability is the University of Pennsylvania. Here is a brief tour.