IC3: Internet and Computing Core Certification Living Online Study Guide. Ciprian Adrian Rusen

Explain why favorites/bookmarks are helpful. Describe how to establish, save, invoke, and delete a bookmark.

      ■ Explain what a plugin is and its function. Describe how to find, install, configure, use, disable, enable, and delete a plugin.

      ■ Explain how the History function of a browser works and how to use it. Describe how to clear history.

      ■ Demonstrate how to search using an internet browser, including the use of advanced features such as using basic Boolean logic including, Or, And, plus sign +, quotation marks “, etc.

      ■ Tabs

      ■ Downloading/Uploading

      

In the third part, “Living Online,” we start by talking about the Internet and the World Wide Web. You will learn what they are, what their names mean, and the mandatory terminology that will help you make sense of everything.

      The Web is such an important part of our lives that everyone should know the basics of browsing the Web. That’s why we will share things like how to use web browsers, the basics of navigating the Web, downloading and uploading files, and setting a homepage in your web browser.

      Toward the end of this chapter we will take a deeper dive and cover more complex subjects like how to use and clear your browsing history, how to use favorites or bookmarks, how to search for text inside a web page from your web browser, and how to use plug-ins and add-ons to enhance your web-browsing experience.

      There is a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started.

      Understanding the Terminology about the Internet and the WWW

      Everyone has heard the term Internet, but even though we use it on a daily basis, not that many of us know what this word means. The Internet is a global network of interconnected networks that use standardized communication protocols – a set of rules that specify how data is transmitted – to exchange data. It operates without being governed by any entity, and each network that is part of the Internet joins it voluntarily while remaining autonomous from other networks. To put it more simply, the Internet is the physical network of computers and devices (smartphones, tablets, and the like) all over the world.

      The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States government in the 1960s to build robust communication using computer networks known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). The term Internet was first used in December 1974, and the Internet, as a global network of networks, was fully commercialized in the United States by 1995. It started a rapid expansion to Europe and Australia in the mid- to late 1980s and to Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There is no consensus on the exact date when the modern Internet came into being, but most specialists agree that it started to exist in the early to mid-1980s.

      According to the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, in 2014 the world’s Internet users surpassed 3 billion or 43.6 percent of the world’s population. By region, 42 percent of the world’s Internet users were based in Asia, 24 percent in Europe, 14 percent in North America, 10 percent in Latin America and the Caribbean taken together, 6 percent in Africa, 3 percent in the Middle East, and 1 percent in Australia/Oceania.

      One of the most frequent mistakes we all make is that when we think of the Internet, the first thing we think about is the World Wide Web (WWW). The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably, but they’re actually not the same thing. The World Wide Web (abbreviated as WWW, commonly known as the Web) is a system of websites connected by links. Websites are stored on servers on the Internet, and the WWW is a part of the Internet but not the whole of Internet.

      

The World Wide Web was invented by the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. Before the Web, the Internet transmitted only text and was used primarily by military officials and scientists. By utilizing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), web pages can include text, images, videos, and other types of media files.

      Websites are locations connected to the Internet that maintain one or more web pages. A website is a set of related web pages typically served from a single web domain and hosted on at least one server that is accessible via the Internet. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web.

      A web page is a document, typically written in text, that can incorporate multimedia content like pictures, audio, and video that is suitable for the World Wide Web and web browsers.

      A web browser is the application that you use to display a web page on a computer or mobile device. It coordinates the various resources and elements that are found on each web page so that they are displayed correctly in a form that is humanly readable. The major web browsers are Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari. The first web browser was invented in 1990, and it was called WorldWideWeb, to suggest that is was the only software needed to navigate websites and web pages found on the real World Wide Web.

      Getting back to the Internet, the most common use for the Internet is to browse the World Wide Web using web browsers. However, since the Internet is a global network of interconnected networks, the Internet is capable of doing much more than providing access to websites. With the help of the Internet, we can send email messages to other people, use programs that take real-time data from the Internet and share it with us (for example, traffic data, weather data, stock market data, and so on), transfer files to other people across the globe, chat with others, access other computers across the globe, and much more. The ways the Internet can be used are practically unlimited, whereas the WWW is just one way to use the Internet.

      Understanding the World Wide Web

      Every website and web page on the World Wide Web has an address that can be used to find it with the help of a web browser. That address is called its URL (Uniform Resource Locator), and it consists of the following elements:

      Protocol The specific data-transmission rules for accessing the resource on the Web. For websites and web pages, it can be http:// (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) or https:// (the s at the end stands for Secure). It used to be that you had to type the protocol to reach a website, but today’s web browsers supply it automatically.

      Prefix www is the prefix used for visiting websites on the Web. Most websites do not require it, and they can be accessed without typing www as the prefix. For example, typing www.example.com or example.com leads you to the same web page. The www prefix must always be followed by a dot.

      Domain Name This consists of one or more parts or labels, delimited by dots, like example.com. The right label (com) is called the top-level domain. Each label to the left of the top-level domain is a subdomain of the domain on its right. In example.com, example is a subdomain of the com domain. Some websites may have multiple subdomains, like example1.example2.com. In this scenario, example 1 is a subdomain of example 2, and example2 is a subdomain of the com top-level domain.