WWW stands for "World Wide Web". The WWW project, started by CERN (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), seeks to build a distributed hypermedia system.
The advantage of hypertext is that in a hypertext document, if you want more information about a particular subject mentioned, you can usually "just click on it" to read further detail. In fact, documents can be and often are linked to other documents by completely different authors -- much like footnoting, but you can get the referenced document instantly!
To access the web, you run a browser program. The browser reads documents, and can fetch documents from other sources. Information providers set up hypermedia servers which browsers can get documents from.
The browsers can, in addition, access files by FTP, NNTP (the Internet news protocol), gopher and an ever-increasing range of other methods. On top of these, if the server has search capabilities, the browsers will permit searches of documents and databases.
The documents that the browsers display are hypertext documents. Hypertext is text with pointers to other text. The browsers let you deal with the pointers in an easy way -- click on the highlighted text, and you are presented with the text to which it points.
Hypermedia is a superset of hypertext -- it is any medium with pointers to other media. This means that browsers might not display a text file, but might display images or sound or animations. Mosaic has the capability to let you access and play sounds and movies, as well as display high resolution color pictures, maps, and photographs.
If you are using Mosaic and WWW with a modem, you will probably want to turn the display of pictures off. When you do this, only the text of Web documents will be transferred over the net to your computer, which is much faster. To do this, select or de-select the Auto-load images option from the Options menu.
When pictures are turned off, each place in a document or page where there should be a picture will have a small icon instead. If you would like to see any of these pictures, just click on them. The picture will be transferred over the net, so you can see it.
If you click on a file or document and realize that you no longer want it (perhaps it is longer than you realized and don't want to wait for it), click on the spinning globe up in the corner of the Mosaic window. This will halt the transfer of information to your computer. It sometimes takes a few seconds for the transfer to stop, and it may appear to be "frozen" for a moment; please be patient. Try not to start clicking madly until you have waited at least a minute or so.
Each helper application has its own menu bar that will be displayed, and you can use that to quit the program and return to Mosaic.
Or you may just click in the Mosaic window to bring Mosaic back. Doing this will leave the helper application running, and you could run out of memory if you have too many helper applications running at one time. If you do get an "Out of memory" message, just switch to one of the helper applications and quit to get more memory for other programs.
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