The main services used on the internet include: |
| • Web browsing – Supported by the HTTP protocol, this functions allows users to view web pages using a web browser. |
| • E-mail – Allows people to send and receive electronic messages. |
| • Instant Messaging [Chatting]: Instant messaging using internet. |
| • E-Commerce: Online shopping/trade. |
| • Telnet : Remote Login service. |
| • E-learning : Online Education. |
| Other lesser used services include telnet (allows remote login to computers), FTP (Allows quick file transmission to remote computers), and gopher (An early form of text based form of reading internet documents which is rarely used today). |
| Accessing the Internet |
| People use an internet browser to access web pages that are available across the internet. Internet browsers include Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Mozilla, and others. |
| Web pages are created in a marked up form of text file called HTML (Hyper-Text Markup Language). The markup within the text indicates document structure showing where paragraphs begin and end, what items are in a list, headers, tables and other document structure. |
| When people are browsing of surfing the internet, they usually go from place to place by clicking on links. These links are locations for specific pages and indicate the three things: |
| 1. Protocol being used such as http or |
| 2. The domain that the web page is found on. This will point to a specific organization’s or company’s web server. |
| 3. The location of the page on the server including the directory path and file name. |
| An example link is “http://education.ebizel.com/html/dos/dos02_02.php”. In this case http is the protocol being used the education.ebizel.com domain indicates where the organization’s web server is, and the /html/dos/dos02_02.php “part of the string indicates the folders the file is in and the name of the file. |
| These links are sometimes called hyperlinks or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) |