A couple of times a week, I cull through articles from our wire services, looking for computer stories. A year ago, most of those stories were about software. Today, they're about Internet sites.
This makes perfect sense. There are many times more World Wide Web sites than there are software titles. And reviewing Web sites is a cinch compared with installing and learning a new program.
But for the reader, it's another story. After reading a rhapsody about some site that reveals The Secrets of Life, you, dear reader, must find this Shangri-la. On the Internet.
Assuming - unlike the hapless fellow on the Fuse.Net commercials - that you have found the Internet, you must then type some gibberish into your browser, such as:
http://www.superduper.net/~billy_bob/Secrets_of_Life.html.
Be aware: That's a tilde before ''billy_bob,'' those are underscores where spaces should be, Secrets and Life should be capitalized, but nothing else can be, and if you put a period after ''html,'' your browser will tell you the site couldn't be found. (Sorry, those infernal copy editors insist on punctuation!)
Easier to use. Yeah, sure...
The irony is this computer-ese is supposed to make it easier to visit Billy Bob. You see, Billy Bob is really at 186.13.254.123. That's the IP (Internet Protocol) number, which is what the network uses to link to Billy Bob. But someone decided that a wordy address would be easier to remember than an Italian phone number. So they created ''domain names.''
Lost yet? Hang in there. I'll explain how this all works.
First, that line of gibberish is called a URL, or uniform resource locater. That means it is a standard way to find stuff on the Internet. Think of it as a sentence.
The first word in the sentence is the part of the Internet in which to look. Http (HyperText Transport Protocol) means you will be looking for a hypertext file on the Web. As you click from site to site, you might also see ''ftp'' (connect to a site that stores files you can download), ''gopher'' (connect to a server that performs searches) or even ''telnet'' (log directly into a server).
Then a colon and two slashes. That's standard to all sites. Well, except for newsgroups, which don't use slashes (such as: news:rec.music.beatles).
Next is the domain name. There is some standardization here, but not much. Most Web sites start with ''www'' meaning World Wide Web, followed by a period - called a ''dot'' by veteran Web surfers. Then the name of the organization, another dot and a three-letter suffix that indicates the type of organization (com is commercial, edu is school, gov is governmental body, mil is military, net is network provider, org is non-profit organization).
If it's a two-letter suffix, you've ventured outside the United States; that suffix indicates what country you're visiting (uk = United Kingdom, au = Australia, ca = Canada, etc.). For a list of country codes, visit http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/wwwstat/country-codes.txt.
Then come the slashes.
If you've ever had to muddle through DOS, you're a leg up. A DOS path (c:\windows\system\drivers\d24drv.exe) suddenly looks like a URL if you just flip the slashes the other way. That's exactly what it is: a path to a file hidden in a sub-directory in a Web server. The slashes are reversed because Web servers use an operating system called Unix. Unix paths use forward slashes instead of back slashes.
Unix has other quirks, like DOS. It doesn't like spaces, so spaces are represented as the underscore character (_). Unix file and directory names are case-sensitive, which means if billy_bob is all lowercase, you must type it that way. There's also that funny tilde character: Many Unix administrators use the tilde to indicate someone's personal directory, so '' - ~billy_bob'' means Billy Bob is probably a customer of SuperDuperNet. And in Billy Bob's directory is a file with the extension ''html,'' meaning it's a hypertext document. If it has the extension ''txt,'' your browser will still read it, but it won't look as cool.
Pop quiz time
Now, lets say someone gives you a long URL, and it doesn't work. You can take a couple tacks: Start with the domain name and see if you can find links to the page you want. Or work backward, eliminating one level (the stuff between the slashes) at a time until you find one that works. If you see a personal name, try a tilde before it. And watch the case of letters.
Playing with URLs can drop you into places that the Web masters might not want you to visit. Depending on your browser (and how little security is on the server), sometimes you can hack into files and directories.
Ready? OK, here are a few URLs that will help you get started:
http://www.screen.com/understand/start.nclk
http://www.fau.edu/rinaldi/netiquette.html
http://www.uwm.edu/Mirror/inet.services.html
And don't go looking for Billy Bob. I made him up.
E-mail Charles Brewer with questions, comments and suggestions at cbrewer@enquirer.com.