By Colette Wagner
Director for Education, Training, and Staff Development, CUNY Office of instructional Technology and Government & Industry

[Academic Information Technologies is in the process of implementing World Wide Web access from the Faculty Training and Development Lab. In this article, reprinted with permission from FY'I, Spring 1995, Colette Wagner offers an intriguing "preview of coming attractions.")

Seductive, addictive, engrossing ... the Internet phenomenon known as the World Wide Web (a.k.a. the WWW and W3) has become a global mania. Those who have access to the web seem to live online, while the rest of the world voraciously reads articles or views news features about the exponential growth of WWW resources that magically accrue on a daily basis. It is an exciting time in our technological and intellectual history, with far-reaching implications for authoring, publishing, and scholarship, and whole new territories of copyright and intellectual property to be explored.

What Is This Thing Called Web?

Officially, the World Wide Web has been defined as the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge. It is an initiative started at Cern (the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, located near Geneva), now with many participants. It has a body of software, and a set of protocols and conventions ... and uses hypertext and multimedia to make ... it easy for anyone to roam, browse, and contribute to. (http: / / www.w3.org/hypertext WWW/The Project)

Other definitions of the web wax considerably more poetic. For example, in a recent call for participation in an international WWW consortium held in Brussels on April 7th to determine the European contribution to the continued development of the web, the WWW was acclaimed as
... driving the Internet expansion throughout the world ... and as being of strategic importance for the future development of the information society. (http://www.inria.fr/Actualites/consortium-eng.html)

Essentially, the W3 is based on
... a principle of universal readership that once information is available, it should be accessible from any type of computer, in any country, and an (authorized) person should only have to use one simple program to access it. (http:/ /info.cern.ch/hypertext/ WWW/Talks/General/ Concepts.html)

The web was initiated as a concept in 1989, but it became an international phenomenon in October 1993, when the National Center for Super Computing Applications at Urbana Champaign released working versions of the Mosaic browser for all common platforms: X, PC/Windows and Macintosh. Today, the two most common browsers for viewing the WWW from Unix machines, Windows machines, and Macintoshes are Mosaic and Netscape (a commercially produced viewer that has its roots in the Mosaic developments of NCSA). Coverage in the New York Tunes and the Manchester Guardian followed in December 1993 and the rest is history.

If, as you have been reading this article, you have been curious about the citation format that is being used, you are reading the network address of the information server where the quotation was located. The http:// and information following is the URL, or Universal Resource Locator that expresses the address of the server or information repository on the Internet. In the first example, the wwww3.org represents the home server of the World Wide Web; in the second example, the wwwinria.fr represents a server located at the French National Institute for Research in Computing and Automation. The http constant in the addresses cited above represents the basic format of the web, or hypertext transfer protocol, which allows all clients (Macintoshes, PCs and Unix machines) to communicate with all servers, wherever they are located on the Internet.

Aside from the concept of URL and http, there is one other essential standard that applies to information published in W3_HTML or hypertext markup language. HTML is the common language that links all of the information in the WWW together and makes all of the documents in the web look similar to the reader. To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse. To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.

The CUNY Open Systems Center and W3: the Beginning of a Beautiful Relationship

When the Open Systems Center was developed in the Fall 1993, it was constructed to take advantage of the rapidly growing resources of the Internet. It consists of mixed platforms (Windows, Macintosh, and Unix machines) connected to each other in a multiprotocol 10base-T network that is gatewayed to the University's T /I Internet connection. Each of the machines in the center has its own unique IP (Internet Protocol) address, the essential network element for accessing information in the WWW Staff of the Open Systems Center have been monitoring W3 developments since Fall 1993. Faculty workshops in surfing the net and preparing HTML documents have been SRO on the Open Systems Center faculty training calendar since Spring 1994.

The CUNY Home Page, a project of the Open Systems Center, was announced in the Fall 1994. Its initial contents were directed at providing institutional information resources. On the campus information side, it included a map of CUNY with links to other known CUNY servers (like the Graduate Center server, the experimental Brooklyn College server, and the Queens College Sociology Department server), pointers to existing gopher resources about CUNY, and the TESL gopher resources that are used by English as a Second Language teachers around the world. On the research side, special HTML documents prepared for the inauguration of the CUNY Home Page were included in the CUNY Multimedia Courseware Development Initiative (a program of the CUNY Office of Instructional Technology which has had a four-year history of funded faculty multimedia courseware projects) and featured The Art of Renaissance Science, The Crater Mountain Rainforest Wilderness (David Gillison, Art, Lehman College), and references to several other entries that are, in W3 parlance, under construction.

At present the Open Systems Center is working with Campus Technology Planning Committees at the CUNY colleges to understand how each college will be administering its campus web server, and to make sure that the CUNY web server accurately reflects local campus implementations. In March 1995, copies of all of the campus entries on the CUNY web server were sent to the Campus Technology Planning Committees for update and comment. The Campus Planning Committees were also invited to designate individuals at their college to participate in a group that will continue to work with Open Systems Center staff to ensure that the CUNY Home Page incorporates pointers to all of the information that the CUNY colleges publish officially on the World Wide Web.

In many ways, the technology of the World Wide Web is a special boon to CUNY, allowing us to be as gloriously diverse as we are while simultaneously empowering us to link together in a University community that is as important a presence on the Internet as it is to the city we were created to serve.