Welcome to OmniWeb 2.0, NEXTSTEP's premier web browser! This section introduces some of the basic concepts associated with the Internet and with using a web browser. If this is your first NEXTSTEP application, we recommend reading through your NEXTSTEP User's Guide.
Like telephone networks, the web invisibly spans the globe, shuttling data (whether it's text or images) and joining users around the world.
How Do You Access the Information?
A web browser like OmniWeb is used to view this data, to navigate from one site to another, and to organize the information you find.
Web Pages
Most organizations connected to the Internet do not allow outsiders to look around their sites. However, many do present select pieces of information through publicly available files which are written in a standard interchange format such as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). Users can access these pages through an address (see URLs below) which points to a specific page.
Web pages provide a public face for individuals or entire companies, and can be simply plain text, or complex pages of text, graphics, audio and sometimes forms that can be filled out and sent back to the organization. They can even perform database searches, and much more.
Links and Anchors
Web pages can also reference one another through anchors. An anchor is either a link to another document, a link to another anchor in any document, or a destination to which other anchors refer. In OmniWeb, link anchors appear on a web page as colored and underlined text, unless you change your default preferences. Destination anchors appear as plain text which are colored when activated. (The words "Links and Anchors" above is a destination anchor &emdash; scroll back up to the top of the page and click on "Links and Anchors", below the page title, to see what happens.)
Clicking a link on a site's web page can take you to a different part of that page, to a different web page at that organization, or to another web site entirely.
For example, a guitar manufacturer in New Zealand can create a web page that references, through a link, a recording studio they own in Kentucky. An interested user viewing this page can click the link in New Zealand to immediately display a library of pre-recorded guitar works held in Kentucky.
URLs
Just as all of us have phone numbers, there's a common addressing convention used to locate web sites on the Internet. These addresses are known as URLs (Universal Resource Locators). Examples of URLs include http://www.lighthouse.com/ or http://www.omnigroup.com/, where the company name appears after the prefix 'www' (for World Wide Web). HTTP stands for "HyperText Transfer Protocol". There are several "Protocols" or languages that you can speak over the Internet; most sites can speak several different protocols, and in fact often have the same information available via several. HTTP is the newest web protocol, but not every site "speaks" it, so occasionally you'll have to use older protocols like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or Gopher. OmniWeb can transfer files using any of these protocols.
If you're checking to see if your favorite company has a web site, try using the command Find Company (Command-shift-C), and entering the company's name. You'll be amazed at who's out there!
Launching OmniWeb
To start OmniWeb, find its icon in the Workspace and double-click it:
On launch, OmniWeb will display a default start page, containing links you can click to take you to many different places.
The following chapters describe how to use OmniWeb to navigate the Internet; how to use OmniWeb's button ribbon for quick access to several commands, how to store and organize your favorite URLs as Bookmarks, and how to track where you've been during an OmniWeb session through two different History panels.
What If the Manual Isn't Enough?
If you've looked through the manual and still can't find what you're looking for, use the Suggestion panel to send us your question or call us directly. We'd be happy to hear from you. Our e-mail address is omniweb@lighthouse.com, or in the United States, you can dial
1-800-366-2279 toll-free (from other countries, call 1-415-570-7736). You can also fax us at 1-415-570-7787.
Other Recommended Reading
If you want to learn more about HTML (the language in which WWW documents are written), here is an introduction to HTML by Ian S. Graham.
To learn more about the Internet, we recommend the following publication: EFF's Guide to the Internet, by Adam Gaffin. This guide was created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and was written to help people with little Internet experience navigate the vast amounts of information available. To access information about this guide, try the following URL: http://www.eff.org.
Please send comments, corrections, and suggestions regarding this documentation to OmniWeb-docs@omnigroup.com. Omni always welcomes your feedback!