At the top of this display, you'll see a row of square buttons containing small icons, labelled ``Back,'' ``Forward,'' ``Home,'' and so on. They correspond to various operations that Netscape can perform. If you move the pointer on to the button labelled ``Back'' and press the left mouse button, Netscape will display the page you were looking at before you followed the link. You can always ``back up'' to where you were before, so you can't get lost by following a succession of links.
Similarly, clicking on the ``Home'' button will always take you all the way back to the first page of today's presentation, however many links you have followed.
Every WWW page has a ``Uniform Resource Locator,'' or URL for short, that identifies it. If you want to go directly to a WWW page that you don't have a link for, you can click on the ``Open'' button. This will cause a pop-up window to appear, with a place for you to type in the URL of the page you want to have displayed. (At first, the pop-up window shows the URL of the page that Netscape is currently displaying. You can either edit this URL or press the ``Clear'' button inside the pop-up window to erase it.)
URLs are typically long, oddly punctuated, strange-looking sequences of
characters beginning with http://. You may have seen them in
television advertisements, magazines, or newspapers. For instance, the URL
for this WWW page is
http://www.math.grin.edu/~stone/events/gms-www-demo/navigation.htmlAnyone, anywhere in the world, who happens to know this URL can ask her browser to display this page.
Sometimes an organization simply publishes an Internet name of the machine
that provides access to certain pages. You get the URL for the entry page
by adding http:// at the beginning and / at the
end of this machine name. (For example, news programs on television
station KCCI invite the reader to visit www.kcci.com; the
corresponding URL is http://www.kcci.com/.)
Here's a link to the next page of today's presentation.