by keyword. Select "Education" and then "Environmental fact sheets." envirolink.org Dozens of documents and files related to environmental activism around the world. ENTOMOLOGY spider.ento.csiro.au All about creepy-crawly things, both the good and the bad ones. GEOLOGY gopher.stolaf.edu Select "Internet Resources" and then "Weather and geography" for information on recent earthquakes. GOVERNMENT marvel.loc.gov Run by the Library of Congress, this site provides numerous resources, including access to the Library card catalog and all manner of information about the U.S. Congress. gopher.lib.umich.edu Wide variety of government information, from Congressional committee assignments to economic statistics and NAFTA information. ecix.doc.gov Information on conversion of military installations to private uses. sunsite.unc.edu Copies of current and past federal budgets can be found by selecting "Sunsite archives," then "Politics," then "Sunsite politcal science archives." wiretap.spies.com Documents related to Canadian government can be found in the "Government docs" menu. stis.nih.gov Select the "Other U.S. government gopher servers" for access to numerous other federal gophers. HEALTH odie.niaid.nih.gov National Institutes of Health databases on AIDS, in the "AIDS related information" menu. helix.nih.gov For National Cancer Institute factsheets on different cancers, select "Health and clinical information" and then "Cancernet information." nysernet.org Look for information on breast cancer in the "Special Collections: Breast Cancer" menu. welchlink.welch.jhu.edu This is Johns Hopkins University's medical gopher. HISTORY See under Art. INTERNET gopher.lib.umich.edu Home to several guides to Internet resources in specific fields, for example, social sciences. Select "What's New & Featured Resources" and then "Clearinghouse." ISRAEL jerusalem1.datasrv.co.il This Israeli system offers numerous documents on Israel and Jewish life. JAPAN gopher.ncc.go.jp Look in the "Japan information" menu for documents related to Japanese life and culture. MUSIC mtv.com Run by Adam Curry, an MTV video jock, this site has music news and Curry's daily "Cybersleaze" celebrity report. NATURE ucmp1.berkeley.edu The University of California at Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology runs several online exhibits here. You can obtain GIF images of plants and animals from the "Remote Nature" menu. The "Origin of the Species" menu lets you read Darwin's work or search it by keyword. SPORTS culine.colorado.edu Look up schedules for teams in various professional sports leagues here, under "Professional Sports Schedules." WEATHER wx.atmos.uiuc.edu Look up weather forecasts for North America or bone up on your weather facts. 8.5 WIDE-AREA INFORMATION SERVERS Now you know there are hundreds of databases and library catalogs you can search through. But as you look, you begin to realize that each seems to have its own unique method for searching. If you connect to several, this can become a pain. Gophers reduce this problem somewhat. Wide-area information servers promise another way to zero in on information hidden on the Net. In a WAIS, the user sees only one interface -- the program worries about how to access information on dozens, even hundreds, of different databases. You tell give a WAIS a word and it scours the net looking for places where it's mentioned. You get a menu of documents, each ranked according to how relevant to your search the WAIS thinks it is. Like gophers, WAIS "client" programs can already be found on many public- access Internet sites. If your system has a WAIS client, type swais at the command prompt and hit enter (the "s" stands for "simple"). If it doesn't, telnet to bbs.oit.unc.edu, which is run by the University of North Carolina At the "login:" prompt, type bbs and hit enter. You'll be asked to register and will then get a list of "bulletins,'' which are various files explaining how the system works. When done with those, hit your Q key and you'll get another menu. Hit 4 for the "simple WAIS client," and you'll see something like this: SWAIS Source Selection Sources: 23# Server Source Cost 001: [ archie.au] aarnet-resource-guide Free 002: [ archive.orst.edu] aeronautics Free 003: [nostromo.oes.orst.ed] agricultural-market-news Free 004: [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt-sys-sun Free 005: [ archive.orst.edu] alt.drugs Free 006: [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.gopher Free 007: [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.sys.sun Free 008: [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.wais Free 009: [ archive.orst.edu] archie-orst.edu Free 010: [ archie.au] archie.au-amiga-readmes Free 011: [ archie.au] archie.au-ls-lRt Free 012: [ archie.au] archie.au-mac-readmes Free 013: [ archie.au] archie.au-pc-readmes Free 014: [ pc2.pc.maricopa.edu] ascd-education Free 015: [ archie.au] au-directory-of-servers Free 016: [ cirm2.univ-mrs.fr] bib-cirm Free 017: [ cmns-sun.think.com] bible Free 018: [ zenon.inria.fr] bibs-zenon-inria-fr Free Keywords: selects, w for keywords, arrows move, searches, q quits, or ? Each line represents a different database (the .au at the end of some of them means they are in Australia; the .fr on the last line represents a database in France). And this is just the first page! If you type a capital K, you'll go to the next page (there are several pages). Hitting a capital J will move you back a page. The first thing you want to do is tell the WAIS program which databases you want searched. To select a database, move the cursor bar over the line you want (using your down and up arrow keys) and hit your space bar. An asterisk will appear next to the line number. Repeat this until you've selected all of the databases you want searched. Then hit your W key, after which you'll be prompted for the key words you're looking for. You can type in an entire line of these words -- separate each with a space, not a comma. Hit return, and the search begins. Let's say you're utterly fascinated with wheat. So you might select agricultural-market-news to find its current world price. But you also want to see if it has any religious implications, so you choose the Bible and the Book of Mormon. What do you do with the stuff? Select recipes and usenet-cookbook. Are there any recent Supreme Court decisions involving the plant? Chose supreme-court. How about synonyms? Try roget- thesaurus and just plain thesaurus. Now hit w and type in wheat. Hit enter, and the WAIS program begins its search. As it looks, it tells you whether any of the databases are offline, and if so, when they might be ready for a search. In about a minute, the program tells you how many hits it's found. Then you get a new menu, that looks something like this: Keywords: # Score SourceTitleLines 001: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19 002: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. -- N. choice, option; 36 003: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #465. [results of comparison. 1] Di 19 004: [1000] (roget-thesaurus) #609. Choice. -- N. choice, option; 36 005: [1000] (recipes) aem@mthvax Re: MONTHLY: Rec.Food.Recipes 425 006: [1000] ( Book_of_Mormon) Mosiah 9:96 007: [1000] ( Book_of_Mormon) 3 Nephi 18:185 008: [1000] (agricultural-ma) Re: JO GR115, WEEKLY GRAIN82 009: [ 822] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB351 PROSPECTIVE PLANTINGS 552 010: [ 800] ( recipes) kms@apss.a Re: REQUEST: Wheat-free, Suga 35 011: [ 750] (agricultural-ma) Re: WA CB101 CROP PRODUCTION258 012: [ 643] (agricultural-ma) Re: SJ GR850 DAILY NAT GRN SUM72 013: [ 400] ( recipes) pat@jaamer Re: VEGAN: Honey Granola63 014: [ 400] ( recipes) jrtrint@pa Re: OVO-LACTO: Sourdough/Trit 142 Each of these represents an article or citing that contains the word wheat, or some related word. Move the cursor bar (with the down and up arrow keys) to the one you want to see, hit enter, and it will begin to appear on your screen. The "score" is a WAIS attempt to gauge how closely the citing matches your request. Doesn't look like the Supreme Court has had anything to say about the plant of late! Now think of how much time you would have spent logging onto various databases just to find these relatively trivial examples. 8.6 WHEN THINGS GO WRONG As the Internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under more of a strain. If you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at least on the East Coast of the U.S., you'll sometimes notice that it takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come up. Sometimes, you'll even get a message that there are too many people connected to whichever service you're trying to use and so you can't get in. The only alternative is to either try again in 20 minutes or so, or wait until later in the day, when the load might be lower. When this happens in veronica, try one of the other veronica entries. When you retrieve a file through gopher, you'll sometimes be asked if you want to store it under some ludicrously long name (there go our friends the system administrators again, using 128 characters just because Unix lets them). With certain MS-DOS communications programs, if that name is longer than one line, you won't be able to backspace all the way back to the first line if you want to give it a simpler name. Backspace as far as you can. Then, when you get ready to download it to your home computer, remember that the file name will be truncated on your end, because of MS-DOS's file-naming limitations. Worse, your computer might even reject the whole thing. What to do? Instead of saving it to your home directory, mail it to yourself. It should show up in your mail by the time you exit gopher. Then, use your mail command for saving it to your home directory -- at which point you can name it anything you want. Now you can download it. 8.7 FYI David Riggins maintains a list of gophers by type and category. You can find the most recent one at the ftp site ftp.einet.net, in the pub directory. Look for a file with a name like "gopher-jewels.txt." Alternately, you can get on a mailing list to get the latest version sent to your e-mailbox automatically. Send a mail message to gopherjewelslist- request@tpis.cactus.org (yep, that first part is all one word). Leave the "subject:" line blank, and as a message, write SUBSCRIBE. Blake Gumprecht maintains a list of gopher and telnet sites related to, or run by, the government. He posts it every three weeks to the news.answers and soc.answers newsgroups on Usenet. It can also be obtained via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu, as /pub/usenet/news.answers/us-govt-net-pointers. Students at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Library Studies, recently compiled separate lists of Internet resources in 11 specific areas, from aeronautics to theater. They can be obtained via gopher at gopher.lib.umich.edu, in the "What's New and Featured Resources" menu. The Usenet newsgroups comp.infosystems.gopher and comp.infosystems.wais are places to go for technical discussions about gophers and WAISs respectively. CHAPTER 9: THE WORLD-WIDE WEB 9.1 GETTING SNARED IN THE WEB As nice as gophers are, there's an even better way to navigate and find information resources on the Net -- the World-Wide Web. Originally developed as a resource for physicists, the Web today is fast becoming the Main Street of cyberspace. You'll find interesting characters wandering around, museums and galleries to visit, schools to teach you new skills, even restaurants (some of which will deliver real food in response to e-mail). You name it, chances are somebody's created a Web server about it. Growing numbers of people even have their own personal Web "pages" where they let the world know what they're interested in. The Web's exploded in popularity for two reasons. One is that it is fairly easy to use. As with gophers, you navigate the Web by making selections from your screen -- no more cryptic Unix commands to memorize. The Web also lets you connect to FTP sites, so you no longer even have to use arcane anonymous-FTP commands in most cases. But what really sets the Web apart is hyperlinks. To understand hyperlinks, think of an encyclopedia. As you read an article on, say, Africa, your eye is drawn to a picture of an elephant. You want to learn more about the animal, so you get out the "E" volume and look up "elephant" and start reading. Hyperlinks are the online equivalent of this browsing process. Tim Berners-Lee, who developed the original Web model, came up with a simple language that lets somebody developing a Web document embed pointers to related resources. When you then call up that document, you'll see some words in a different color or somehow otherwise highlighted. By moving your cursor to one of those words and then hitting enter (or clicking on it with your mouse, depending on your interface), you'll then call up the linked document. Because these hyperlinks are easy to create (more on that in a bit) -- anybody can put together a Web resource that can become a central clearinghouse of information on virtually any topic, linking documents that could be physically stored in dozens of locations around the world. 9.2 ALRIGHT, ALREADY, LET'S GO! We're almost there. But first a word about graphics. If you've heard of the Web, chances are good you've also heard of Mosaic. Mosaic, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, brought a graphical, point-and-click interface to the Web, and in less than a year became almost synonymous with it. There are a couple of problems with Mosaic (and related programs), however. One is that you need a machine capable of providing a graphical user interface, such as those running Unix, Windows or the Macintosh operating system. MS-DOS users are out of luck. So are the blind. Also, Mosaic requires a fairly large chunk of computing and network capabilities to work well, so forget about using it on your old 2400-bps modem). If you do have these capabilities, we'll talk about how to set up Mosaic and similar programs in a bit. But for now, let's look at Lynx, a text- based program that gives universal access to the Web -- via a simple dial-up connection in most cases. It doesn't give you the pretty pictures (although you'll be able to download many of them) and it doesn't work with a mouse. But it's simple enough to use -- and one could argue that if you're using the Web just to find information, you might not want pictures, anyway, because they can take so long to get to your computer and display. Lynx, the creation of Michael Grobe, Lou Montulli and Charles Rezac of the University of Kansas, will remind you of gophers in many ways. As with gopher, probably the best way to learn how to use Lynx is just to dive right in. At your host system's command prompt, type lynx and hit enter (Free-Net users: go into the "Teleport" area and look for the "Communications Tower"). If you're lucky, your system administrator has already installed Lynx and you'll see something like this: -------------------------------------------------------------------------- GENERAL OVERVIEW OF THE WEB [IMAGE] There is no "top" to the World-Wide Web. You can look at it from many points of view. Here are some places to start. [IMAGE] by Subject The Virtual Library organises information by subject matter. List of servers All registered HTTP servers by country by Service Type The Web includes data accessible by many other protocols. The lists by access protocol may help if you know what kind of service you are looking for. If you find a useful starting point for you personally, you can configure your WWW browser to start there by default. -- press space for more, use arrow keys to move, '?' for help, 'q' to quit Arrow keys: Up and Down to move. Right to follow a link; Left to go back. H)elp O)ptions P)rint G)o M)ain screen Q)uit /=search [delete]=history list -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If nothing happens, consider asking your system administrator to get Lynx (tell him it's available via anonymous ftp at ftp2.cc.ukans.edu in the pub/lynx directory). Until he does, you can try out Lynx by using telnet to connect to this address: sunsite.unc.edu When you connect, log on as: lynx This is a popular site, so it can be slooow at times. Alternately, you could use telnet to connect to ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu with a log on of: www However, this site (the home of Lynx's creators) will not let you use all of Lynx's features. As you can see from the above, the Web has no real menus, at least not in the sense that gopher does. Instead, the system is composed of documents or "pages" (the "title of contents" or opening page on a Web site is known as its "home page"). If you are using VT100 or similar emulation and a color monitor, the above screen would have certain words in a different color than the others. These words are the hyperlinks. By moving your cursor to one and then hitting enter, you'll move to a new page -- which could be located on a completely different computer somewhere else in the world. The above main page, which comes from the CERN, the European High-Energy Physics Research Center (where Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web) has three main hyperlinks: [IMAGE] by Subject List of servers by Service Type The first one contains a list of various Web resources around the world, categorized by subject. The second one lists them by continent, country and then city. The final one lets you browse among non-Web services, such as our friend gopher and Wide-Area Information Servers (in fact, you could live your entire Internet life within the Web; not only does it let you connect to gophers, ftp sites and the like, but with some Web software, you can even read and reply to Usenet messages as well). To call up any of them, you move your cursor to it (with the down or up arrows) and hit enter. Play with the Web! Move your cursor around, hit enter, and see where you pop up. The key navigational keys are your arrow keys. The up and down arrow keys let you hop among highlighted links. The right arrow key is the same as enter -- it sends you to the highlighted service. The left arrow key is analogous to 'u' in gopher -- it takes you back to the previous document. This arrangement can take a little getting used to. If there are two hyperlinks listed on one line, you would use your down or up arrow to move between them -- NOT your right or left ones! There are additional navigational commands that will come in handy in a hypertext system (without them, it would be easy to get lost rather quickly). A key one is your backspace or delete key. Hitting that will bring up a list of links you've made in the current session; you can then choose one if you want to get back somewhere. Hitting m will bring you back to your "main page," that is, the first page you saw when you started up Lynx. 9.3 ADDRESSING A PROBLEM One feature Lynx has that gophers do not is the ability to go directly to a service by typing in its address. You get to this function by hitting a lower-case g at any point in Lynx. Here's where you run into the mess that is Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The idea behind URLs is actually a good one: to create a universal system for accessing information on the Internet, no matter if it's a single file on an anonymous-FTP site, an entire gopher server, or a Web image. Unfortunately, that means that, in WWW, you're going to have to get used to seeing, and typing, things like: http://www.germany.eu.net/books/eegtti/eegtti.html (which is actually the Web address for an enhanced version of Everybody's Guide to the Internet). Ack! The "http" means you're dealing with a WWW resource -- it stands for "HyperText Transport Protocol," which is the particular way the Web moves information around the world. Lynx needs that information to be able to figure out how to connect to the system. Next comes the name of the site on which the resource is located, followed by the directory path. URLs are case sensitive, so be careful! In the above example, notice how the last item ends in ".html." That stands for "HyperText Markup Language," which is the coding used to create hyperlinks. You'll often find Web addresses ending in that, because they will be pointers to main pages for particular resources. Sometimes, if you are trying to reach a service without a main HTML page (a gopher, for example), you may have to end the address with a /, for example: gopher://gopher.eff.org/ Fortunately, in many cases, you will have to type these long names only once. Recall how hitting your backspace or delete key creates a list of hyperlinks to services you've tried in a particular session. You can also create a list of "bookmarks" to speed you to particular services in the future. To add a page to your list, hit a lower-case a while on that page. You'll be asked if you want to add the document or the hyperlink to your bookmark page. Choose the document option and it'll be added. To see your bookmark list, hit v. You'll then be able to zoom to any services in the list by moving your cursor to its highlighted name and hitting enter.