E-commerce and Information Technology in Hospitality and Tourism Chapter 2 Internet Fundamentals

Copyright 2004 by Zongqing Zhou, PhD Niagara University

2.1 Defining The Internet

   A global network of computers communicating with each other using a common language--- A network of networks.

Also referred to as the Information Super Highway, or World Wide Web.

Using the highway analogies has several advantages. – it lays the foundation for later chapters when we talk about speed of information transmission in the Internet. – Information such as text, voice, graphics and videos are like vehicles of all types traveling through the Internet. The more vehicles traveling on a highway, the slower the speed. – The wider the highway the more likely the vehicles will be able to travel high speed. Telephone lines are like an old country path that will not be able to accommodate large trucks (large chucks of information such as multimedia digital signals).

2.1 Defining The Internet (cont.)

 Composed of two major parts: – Hardware: Telephone networks, cables, routers, computers, servers, and satellites.

– Software: programs, applications, and protocols which make communication and transactions online possible.

Server Router

Figure 2.1

a simple internet Computer Person Router Server Router Server

History of the Internet

     1960s Rand Corporation was entrusted to develop a strategic communication system --- a loosely connected command network, where any point in the network could send or receive messages, which is the foundation of the peer-to-peer system.

The idea is to decentralize the information control. Today, the idea is still very much alive and in fact explains why the Internet is so popular and widely spread. Late 1960s saw the construction of such a system funded by ARPA (Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency) This system or network came to be called ARPANET.

Communication between networks was made possible by the Internet Protocol or “IP”.

History of the Internet (cont.)

  ARPA developed the transmission control protocol/ Internet protocol or “TCP/IP” to connect incompatible computers and networks used by government agencies, the military, government suppliers and research institutions. TCP converts data into packets which are sent across the transmission lines to the next computer whose TCP reconverted packets into data it can read.

History of the Internet (cont.)

  Email was introduced in 1972, almost 20 years before the WWW  In Oct 1972, the use of the Internet spread quickly after its first demonstration to the public 1990, ARPANET, the first Internet network, ceased to exist.

 By 1991, the Internet had become an important means of communication.

2.3 Internet Basics The Word Wide Web (1)

  First, there is the Internet before the WWW. Secondly, the Internet before the WWW uses a text-only interface, display on your computer screen.  Thirdly, today most people use the two terms (the Internet and (WWW) interchangeably  But technically speaking, the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet and the Web are two separate but related concepts.  The Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure.

The World Wide Web (2)

     In 1989 Time Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

In 1994, WWW gained wide spread popularity.

The Web adds a graphical interface to the Internet that made gathering and retrieving information easier.

The Web also made presentation of voice, data, graphics, and video possible and attractive.

Its hyperlink capability made possible by the HTML, the simple programming language for the Web.

The World Wide Web (3)

 The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet.   It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet. The Web uses the HTTP protocol, only one of the languages spoken over the Internet, to transmit data. Web services, which use HTTP to allow applications to communicate in order to exchange business logic, use the Web to share information.

The World Wide Web (4)

 The Web also utilizes browsers, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, to access Web documents called Web pages that are linked to each other via hyperlinks.  Web documents also contain graphics, sounds, text and video.

The Word Wide Web (5)

  The Web is an abstract, imaginary cyberspace super-imposed on the infrastructure of the Internet. The Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.

The Word Wide Web (6)

 The WWW is a component of the Internet, but it is different from it in several aspects: – It uses a graphical based interface, enabling color and graphical displays – Its information uses texts that are marked up (HTML) – And thus requires a special decoding device (browser) – Servers with special programs are needed (Web servers) – The information contained in a Web document can be hyperlinked.

The Word Wide Web (7)

 The main components of the Web is the Web Servers and browsers.

– Web servers are computers that store the data in HTML to be retrieved by the Web users as Web pages.

The Browser

  Is the interface that allows one to see graphics and text files that make up the Web and the Internet. – An interface is a program to translate and present information on the computer screen.

The browser is like a detective’s microscope or decoding device. The browser is used to display the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as the standard publication texts.

The Browser

  It is important to point out that there are other browsers than Microsoft Internet Explorer. Telnet is the ‘browser’ to the Internet before the WWW as the browser of today to the Web. It is the interface for text-based communication between computers on the Internet

The Browser (cont.)

 Berners-Lee created the first browser called the World Wide Web  1993 saw the first commercialized browser, Mosaic, developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The Browser (cont.)

 Today’s most popular browsers are Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

 Two concepts on how the web works include: – Universal resource locator (URL), the address of a webpage located anywhere on the Web.

– Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), a method of accessing the Internet.

Hypertext and HTML

 Hypertext is an item designated as a hyperlink, which, when clicked, will take the user to another page within that site or to another page or imaging on another site.  A hyperlink can be text or a graphic or any item designated as such.

 An HTML document is a plain text document that is “marked up” with codes for browser display.

HTML

 HTML: Hypertext Markup Language) is a collection of platform-independent styles indicated by markup tags that define the various components of the w Web document.

 In an HTML document, differrent codes and symbols are used to indicate different text styles and appearance when viewed by a browser.

Table 2.1

Common Tags Used in HTML           

HTML is Easy To Learn

Welcome to the world of HTML.

This is the first paragraph. While short it is still a paragraph!

And this is the second paragraph.

**The required elements are the , ,