The World Wide Web (Web for short) is a collection of multimedia documents that are stored on computers located throughout the world and accessible via the Internet. The text formatting features, color, images, sound, video, and movies available to designers of Web documents allow the creative and meaningful presentation of information on the Web.
A Web page is everything you can view (using scroll bars) when you display a Web document, not just what fits on a screen or a printed page. Most Web pages contain links to other Web pages. These links appear in the page as highlighted words, phrases, or images. You can move your cursor to the highlighted item and click once to bring the linked document to your screen. To try out this feature, click on the highlighted items in the list below.
an image (24-bit JPEG format, 9K)
an audio track (AIFC format, 600K)
a movie (Silicon Graphics® compressed movie file format, 2.7 MB)
You have some Web documents on your system; they were installed as a part of your Netscape installation. This page is an example of a local Web document. You can view local Web documents even if you are not yet connected to the Internet.
Once you are connected to the Internet, you can view Web documents from all over the world. You'll find a fascinating array of information once you start exploring.
Be sure you are connected to the Internet before you try to access Web documents not on your system.
You can use the Netscape Navigator software (usually referred to as Netscape) to browse the Web. Netscape allows you to view documents and follow links without being concerned about the location of the documents or the complexity of the network that must be traveled to locate them.
You're using Netscape right now - it displayed the Web page you're looking at. The buttons at the top of this window control Netscape. You won't be using most of these buttons until a little later. For now, you just need to learn about a few navigational basics.