Web, Mosaic: building blocks for publishing on the Internet.

Right now, anyone who wants to publish on the Internet can, and it will become easier as the set of tools to do so continues to take shape.

It's generally accepted that the World-Wide Web and NCSA Mosaic will be the metaphor on which Internet publishing will be built. Software publishers are rushing to bring out tools that enhance and complement the basic interface. Mosaic, developed by Mark Andreessen at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and released for Macintosh and Windows computers last fall, allows users to point and click their way through the Internet.

HTTP is key

The Web is a loosely organized entity, a collection of documents on about 3,000 servers worldwide, connected to one another through logical hypertext links. The core of the Web is a protocol called Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP), developed and put in the public domain by CERN, a physics lab in Geneva. HTTP sets up rules for the communication between the Web server and the Web client, or browser, software, which runs on each user's desktop computer. Mosaic is the most popular of several browsers available for the Web, and there are several versions of it.

You must set up a server and connect it to the Internet according to the HTTP protocol. (Documentation and resource code for HTTP are available on the Internet.) Servers are usually Unix-based machines, and most server software is designed for that operating system. But at least one version is available for the Mac: a program called MacHTTP (see MacWEEK, Oct. 24, Page 10) from BIAP Systems. MacHTTP is proving to be the key Internet publishing tool for Macs. Macs used as Internet servers or clients also require MacTCP, an extension included with System 7.5 that enables the Mac to use the TCP/IP protocol used by the Internet.

Formatting with HTML

Mosaic and other …