At first glance, many people think that a Web browser is nothing more than a container for static Web pages that are downloaded from the Internet. But look again-if either Microsoft or Netscape are even partly successful in their visions to redefine client/server computing, the browser is going to be the key. Even today, the current incarnations of Navigator and Explorer contain powerful features that go way beyond mere Web surfing, and yet they remain simple to use.
The whole foundation of this book is based on the concept (and soon your Intranet project will be too) that the browser is the key. The Web browser is the single piece of software that every desktop needs to have in order to take advantage of the Intranet. One of the reasons this is such a sweeping concept is that browsers are so cheap to deploy. Indeed, two of the most famous Web browsers, Microsoft Internet Explorer and ncSA Mosaic from the University of Illinois, are free! That's right, everyone in your organization can run a free, easy-to-use program and benefit from the increased efficiency and electronic communication made possible by the Intranet.
I assume that because you are reading this book, you will probably play a major role in establishing or leading the Intranet project in your organization. You may even be the Webmaster within your company. But whether or not you have the job title of Webmaster, you are at the very least an Intranet champion. As such, you will face the task of researching the Internet to find the right tools and technologies to usher the project through to success. Of course this book will help, but you will still need to keep up with new Web products that are being announced every day.
To keep up-to-date, you obviously need to browse the Web yourself, and you obviously need to be proficient with a Web browser. I thought it might be a good idea to glimpse at some of the features offered by the most popular browsers for Windows NT and Windows 95. This chapter might give you a few quick ideas on how you can train the masses (your customers) to use their Web browsers when your Intranet is up and rolling. If you are already familiar with using your browser, by all means skip or skim this chapter.
This chapter is by no means a complete browser tutorial or review. Rather, in the interest of brevity, I'll just cover a single interesting feature in each of the big three browsers. Obviously, they each contain many features that I don't have the space to cover here. But they all have so much in common that a discussion about any given feature in one browser can be easily applied to the other two. I hope this information will be just enough to stimulate your imagination with regard to the many other capabilities present in each browser.
We've all heard about the Wall Street craze over Netscape. The reason for all the excitement is that Netscape currently has a very big lead in the popularity race for the best browser on the Internet. (About 80 percent of the Web pages viewed on the Internet every day are read using Netscape.) Because the Internet represents a wide open opportunity for Microsoft's competitors to attempt to reshape the software industry, the stakes are enormous.
You might think that if Mosaic and Internet Explorer are free products, few people would want to pay for Netscape Navigator. As I write this book, Netscape is giving away both the personal edition of version 2.0 and the beta version of their new 3.0 browser, but the company does expect you to pay the license fee for corporate use.
Despite the fact that Mosaic and Internet Explorer are free, there are many reasons that most Internet analysts think Navigator will probably succeed in this competitive market. The following are just a few:
| Note |
To download a free copy for personal use of the latest release of Netscape Navigator, point your current browser to http://www.netscape.com/. |
You can read newsgroups very conveniently and send e-mail too
without having to leave the comfort of Navigator. In this section,
I show you how to use Netscape Navigator 2.0 to subscribe to a
handy newsgroup. Suppose you would like to read daily articles
about World Wide Web servers for Windows. (Hey, my sharp deductive
powers must rely on what little clues I have to pick a subject
that sounds like it might be of interest to you at this stage
in your life.)
| Tip |
There are so many Usenet newsgroups that it can be very overwhelming to find a good one that has information you are looking for. Fortunately, there is a Web page that will help you search for the name of a newsgroup that matches a keyword you supply. Check out this URL: http://www.tile.net/tile/listserv/index.html |
To read the articles in the comp.infosystems.www.servers.ms-windows newsgroup with Netscape, follow these steps:
Figure 11.1: Configuring Netscape Navigator to locate the NNTP server.
| Note |
When you are trying to quickly scan for interesting how-to articles, search for articles with Re: in the title. What often happens is that a question for help is posted by someone who is having trouble with some aspect of their computer. The good information (the answer) is usually in the reply, and the reply usually includes a copy of the original question. Of course, if you should happen to know the answer to the original question, please share your philanthropy with the rest of us and post a reply yourself. |
Figure 11.2: Reading articles in a selected newsgroup is easy with Netscape Navigator.
As I write this chapter, the current version of Microsoft Internet
Explorer is 2.0. But by the time you read this chapter, version
3.0 should be available for free with Windows NT 4 and as a download
from the Microsoft Web site for Windows 95 and Macintosh users.
| Note |
To download a free copy of the latest release of Microsoft Internet Explorer, point your current browser to http://www.microsoft.com/ie. This URL also leads you to a wealth of information about the features and HTML tags supported by Internet Explorer. |
Some of the features slated for version 3.0 of Internet Explorer
are an enhanced newsreader, support for VRML (they call it ActiveVRML),
32-bit code optimized for multithreading on Windows NT and Windows
95, support for HTML 3.2, and support for SSL (Secure Sockets
Layer). Best of all is its support for ActiveX and VBScript. ActiveX
is Microsoft's name for their new vision of OLE on the Web. VBScript
is a high-level language you (as a page designer) can insert in
your HTML pages to process and manipulate the OLE controls embedded
in the same pages. Several OLE controls (formerly called OCXs,
now called ActiveX controls) are available for free from Microsoft
as part of their Internet Control Pack. If that pack doesn't contain
enough variety for you, dozens of other OLE control vendors have
already announced support for ActiveX.
| Note |
To get a taste of the Microsoft ActiveX Internet Control Pack, browse to http://www.microsoft.com/icp/. Be aware that this page will mostly be of interest to Web page developers and client/server programmers. |
The Favorites menu in Explorer allows you to easily maintain a selection list of places on the Web that you like to visit often. It saves you the trouble of having to remember and retype long URLs.
You're probably wondering why I picked such a trivial subject as this to write about Internet Explorer. First of all, some readers might not be aware of how convenient this feature is. Secondly, I wanted to expose the nature of how Microsoft chose to implement this feature. When you see that Favorites are nothing more than shortcuts in a file system folder, as are a ton of other mechanisms in the NT 4 and Windows 95 shell, you begin to realize how pervasive and powerful the concept is.
How does it work? Basically, when you are browsing the Web and come upon an interesting page that you would like to revisit, just choose Favorites | Add to Favorites from the Explorer menubar to open the dialog shown in Figure 11.3. All you have to do is click the Add button.
Figure 11.3: Saving a favorite in Internet Explorer.
The next time you want to visit that same site, you have several choices. First, you can select it from the list at the bottom of the Favorites menu. Second, you can choose Favorites | Open Favorites and select it from the list that appears in the dialog.
You can't help but notice that the dialog to reopen a Favorite page and the dialog to save a Favorite page (Figure 11.3) appear to be a common file dialog and a version of the file system Explorer program, respectively. That's the whole point; Favorites are shortcut files (with an extension of .url) stored in the current user's profile folder underneath the Windows system folder. See Figure 11.4 for a view of the Explorer file system where all the URL shortcut files are stored.
Knowing that these Favorite pages are stored as shortcut files opens up several new possibilities. For one thing, you can use the file system Explorer to double-click a shortcut file for a Web page that you want to browse. NT knows to launch Internet Explorer in that case, and it will take you to the Web. You also can easily drag the shortcut to your desktop if it happens to be a Web page that you like to check on daily (perhaps http://www.yahoo.com).You no doubt noticed my somewhat clumsy dance in the paragraphs above between the terms Internet Explorer and file system Explorer. If you believe that something should be done to make the software less confusing, you are not alone. In fact Microsoft has plans to make a lot of money on this very idea. Beginning in the Fall of 1996, an update to Windows 95, and probably NT 4, will integrate the file system Explorer application with the Internet Explorer Web browser. Microsoft's vision is that the Web browser should be a free part of the operating system itself.
That vision achieves two purposes. First, it gives Windows users (like you and me) a very convenient way to look for files on the enormous client/server network called the World Wide Web, or even the somewhat smaller (but no less important) client/server network called the Intranet, without requiring a mental shift from the way we already browse for files on our local hard drives. Second, giving away free software helps Microsoft compete with Netscape. We win again.
Mosaic was invented at the University of Illinois at ncSA. ncSA
stands for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Mosaic was the first Web browser to bring the Internet to the
masses due to the way in which it made the Web easily accessible
through the popular graphical environments of Windows and the
Macintosh.
| Note |
The Mosaic Web browser is available for Macintosh, UNIX, and all flavors of Windows. Mosaic can be freely downloaded for personal or internal business use from the University of Illinois Web site at the following URL http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/: |
One of the cool features about Mosaic is its capability to send e-mail to a mailto URL while you are browsing a Web page. Even if you don't click a mailto URL, you can send an e-mail message anytime you are browsing the Web and you come across something that stirs you to comment.
To configure Mosaic for e-mail and enter a simple message, follow these steps:
Figure 11.5: E-mail configuration in Mosaic.
Figure 11.6: Sending mail in Mosaic.
The next chapter dives into the details of how to make the Web browser and the Intranet dovetail together through the powerful and mysterious features of MIME.