Robert Cailliau WWW W3 WORLD WIDE WEB XFIND FIND DOCUMENTATION

When you invoke W3 from a dumb terminal by typing www, you obtain a first piece of information called the "Home" page, which gives you a summary of the available information sources, at CERN and elsewhere.

It currently looks like this :

CERN Information CERN INFORMATION - SELECT BY NUMBER Help[1] About this program, and the World-Wide Web project[2]. Phone book[3] People, phone numbers, accounts and email addresses. See also the analytical Yellow Pages[4], or Pages Jaunes[5]. "XFIND" index[6] Index of computer centre documentation, newsletters, news, help files, etc... News[7] A complete list of all public CERN news groups, such as news from the CERN User's Office[8], CERN computer center news[9], student news[10]. Private groups[11] also exist. NON-CERN ONLINE INFORMATION:- See also a longer list of other sources of online data[12]. ref.number, RETURN for more, Quit, or Help:

When you now type a number displayed in square brackets, the corresponding information is automatically retrieved and displayed. Technically speaking, you have just followed a link to another piece of information, which may in turn contain other references. For instance, typing 2 from the above home page leads to :

The World Wide Web project WORLD WIDE WEB The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia[1] information system aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents. GENERAL PROJECT INFORMATION See also an executive summary[2] of the project, Mailing lists[3] you can join, Policy[4]. Project Status[5] A list of project components and their current state. (e.g. Line Mode[6], NeXTStep[7], Daemon[8]) People[9] A list of people involved in the project. History[10] A summary of the history of the project. TECHNICAL DETAILS Protocols[11] A description of the protocols past and future involved. <ref.number>, Back, <RETURN> for more, Quit, or Help:

This process of finding information by following links is called navigating. To find the data you need, you don't have to know precisely in advance where it is located, nor which system accesses it.

W3 can also perform index searches. It would be preposterous to provide each entry in the phone book as a separate text page, since you would have to scroll through the phone list from the beginning for every lookup. It is better to let the user provide additional information in the form of keywords. In the above example, typing 3 gets you into the phone book as follows:

CERN telephone directory PHONE BOOK This is an index of people and phone numbers at CERN. Provide a surname and/or given name, or phone number as a keyword. See also: what to do if the data is incorrect [1], The ('Yellow pages' [2]) for an index of functions rather than names. End K keywords, ref.number, Back, Quit, or Help: You are now prompted for a name or number, and then W3 will create a hypertext node corresponding to these. The response to typing "Bloggs" followed by return would be: BLOGGS, Joe [1] 4321 ECP XY 200 R-007 End ref.number, Back, Quit, or Help: Note that the answer also contains a reference [1] for more information about Bloggs. Typing 1 will lead to Bloggs' E-mail address and accounts information.

Thus W3 permits navigation in many different information sources without having to log on to the specific platform and without having to know the user interface of the application : the process is entirely uniform, based only on the typing of the selected number (or clicking of the mouse in graphical implementations of W3), or the typing of keywords.