Up until a few years ago, you really did almost have to be a rocket scientist to get around on the Internet. Grepping, pinging and sending files to /dev/null were de rigeur. To get anywhere, every move you made took precise command-line directives. Because the Internet was basically built upon the complex and powerful UNIX operating system, it took complex and powerful commands to master the environment.
Bit by bit, however, things got easier. First came Gopher, with its easier-to-use menus. Then came graphical Gopher clients to make things even easier. Then the floodgates broke: Eudora and other e-mail clients, graphical FTP clients for easy file downloads, until finally—the Web. Now, spanning the globe is literally as easy as a click of your mouse. Today, millions of Web sites around the world offer information of every kind, from up-to-the-minute academic research results and instant stock quotes to online shopping and lighthearted entertainment.
Internet Explorer 3.0 has a number of features that make Web navigation even more efficient than navigation with other browsers. This chapter shows you how to put Internet Explorer to full use and how to put the vast resources of the Web at your fingertips.
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Basic navigation hasn't changed much in Version 3.0; therefore, if you've been using Internet Explorer 2.0, you might want to just lightly skim the first section for any significant changes.
Some of the newest extensions to the Web involve more complex interaction than do the more common text-and-graphics pages. Part IV of this book, "Viewing Interactive Sites," shows you how to use these extensions.
Did you ever have one of those do-it-yourself radio kits when you were a kid? You know the kind—black, green, and yellow wires hooked up to this diode or that transformer or this switch over here. Now think of your TV's remote control. Night and day, right? Well, that's the difference between yesterday's and today's Internet.
Internet Explorer makes the Internet as simple as easy-chair viewing. Click a button on your TV remote and change channels, click a button on your mouse and change Internet channels. As simple as it can be, though, a few tips to start with can make even basic Web exploration more enjoyable and, in case you're surfing for business rather than pleasure, more efficient, too.
When you first install Internet Explorer, the Microsoft Internet Explorer update page will appear, followed by the Microsoft home page thereafter (see Figure 6.1). However, you can set your home page to anything you like. Simply go to whichever page you'd like as your home page and select View | Options. Next, click on the Start and Search Pages tab and click on the Use Current button. You might eventually want your bookmark file to be your home page. The process for doing this is discussed in Chapter 7, "Favorite Places."
Figure 6.1. Microsoft's home page is the first one you'll see when you install Internet Explorer 3.0.
There you are, talking with some of your musician friends, and because you're all computer enthusiasts, you start talking about some cool Web pages. One of your friends assures he has the place for you: Harmony Central at http://www.harmony-central.com/. Later that night, as you surf the Web, you decide to check it out. But how do you get there? Well, there are a couple of ways.
First, you can simply click in the Address: field or the Open Button (which is covered in "The Toolbar" section later in the chapter), type in the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and press Enter (see Figure 6.2). Internet addresses, also called URLs, usually begin with http://, but might also begin with ftp:// or gopher://. (See Chapter 9, "Accessing Other Services with Internet Explorer 3.0." to learn more about other types of Internet sites.)
Figure 6.2. Harmony Central definitely has a lot to offer to the musical surfer.
You can also open a file on your computer's hard drive using this method. To open such a page, use an address with the form
file:///d|/foldername/filename.htm
where d is the drive letter in which the file is located, foldername is the name of the folder or directory in which the file is located, and filename.htm is the name of the file. If you are unsure of the file's location, however, choose File | Open and click Browse to find the file on your hard drive. Then, simply double-click on the file when you find it.
Web page files usually end in the letters .htm or .html, but you can also open plain text files and most graphics files. Note that there are three slashes after the word file: but only two slashes after http:, ftp:, and gopher:. Also, you should use forward slashes (/) within addresses, even on PCs where backslashes (\) are the norm.
Addresses that begin with mailto: and telnet: are also permissible, but they access communication services rather than take you to a page location. The following tip explains the mailto: function. Refer to Chapter 9 to learn how to use telnet:. If an address doesn't begin with any of the standard prefixes (http, ftp, gopher, or telnet), try putting http:// in front of it. For example, I might tell you to stop by noel.educ.msu.edu to check out my home page. You would enter http://noel.educ.msu.edu in the Address box to go there.
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If somebody gives you an address with an @ sign in it, that's their e-mail address. You can't go to it, but you can send the person a message by typing mailto: followed by the address. For example, you can send me e-mail by entering mailto:noele@pilot.msu.edu in the Address box and by typing a message into the window that appears. (For this to work, you need to configure Internet Explorer for e-mail, as described in Part III, "Communicating with Internet Explorer 3.0.")
Also, people often leave out the http:// when speaking of a Web address. For example, if I gave you the address over the phone of one of the web pages I'm currently working on, I might say "Point your Web browser to W-W-W-dot-R-T-dot-M-J-C-dot-S-T-A-T-E-dot-M-I-dot-U-S-slash," meaning that you should enter http://www.rt.mjc.state.mi.us/ in the address box.
When people tell you their Internet addresses, you need to know how to translate their verbal instructions into the following special characters:
Links from one Web page to another are usually indicated by blue underlined text for links that you've never visited and purple underlined text for links that you've already followed. (The color and formatting can vary, however; some Web authors use link colors that coordinate with the images on their pages.)
To go from the page shown in Figure 6.2 to the music links page, for example, scroll down until you see the word Links and click the left mouse button. Internet Explorer automatically takes you to the next page (see Figure 6.3).
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Because most Web pages contain more information than will fit on your screen at one time, you'll often need to scroll down to read the rest of the page. You scroll down by pressing Page Down on your keyboard or by using the scrollbar on the right side of the Explorer window. Occasionally, you might need to scroll to the left to reveal hidden parts of a particularly large image, but Explorer automatically reformats the text and images to stay within the window whenever it can.
Figure 6.3. With a click, you can visit hundreds of musical resources.
Like the Harmony Central home page (and almost all Web pages), the page pictured in Figure 6.3 contains more clickable links. If you scroll down to the Lists of Music Links and click on National Music & Entertainment Directory, you will go directly to a listing of more than 11,000 music- and entertainment-related companies and organizations (see Figure 6.4).
Figure 6.4. Knock yourself out. Need to find a music company? This is the place.
In addition to clicking on text links on Web pages, you can also click on selected images. For example, if you scroll down the page shown in Figure 6.4, you will see the image shown in Figure 6.5.
Figure 6.5. This clickable image can take you to any of five different areas on this site.
The words in the ovals you see are not considered text because they are part of an image. When you click any area on that image, you will go to the place described where you clicked. For example, if you click on the oval called Yellow Page Directory, you will go to the page shown in Figure 6.6.
Normally, clickable images that lead to places you've never been have blue borders, and images linked to places you've visited have purple borders. But many Web page authors don't like the colored borders clashing with their images, so they turn off the borders. Also, some images (like the one pictured in Figure 6.5) take you to different places depending on exactly where you click. These images are called image maps.
The surest way to tell if an image has a clickable link is to move your mouse pointer over it. If the pointer turns into a hand (instead of remaining an arrow), then clicking on the image will take you to the address that appears in the small status message area at the bottom of the Explorer main window.
You can click your way around the Web without touching a menu choice or toolbar button. But after you get used to using these options, you'll never want to live without them. Although the illustrations in this book show the toolbar, Quick Links bar, and Address box displayed (see Figure 6.7), you might want to close one or more of these so that more screen area is displayed.
Figure 6.7. The Explorer window with all button and address options turned on.
Explorer has made modifying these options very easy. Notice in Figure 6.7 that the cursor is positioned over the words Quick Links and appears as a four-headed arrow. If you wanted to hide these buttons, you would use the click-and-drag method to move your cursor up.
Notice, however, that the Address: box is actually the first thing to disappear. (This, by the way, is how you hide the Address: box. To restore the Address: box while getting the Quick Links bar to disappear, simply continue to hold down your mouse button and drag to the left until the buttons are gone.) After you are finished with these steps, your screen should look like Figure 6.8. This operation also works in reverse—just click and drag down to get the buttons to reappear.
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No matter where the Quick Links bar and Address: box are, they are always able to "slide." You can use the click-and-drag method to display a partial Address: box or some of the Quick Links or toolbar options. Feel free to explore the look that's best for you, but remember, the fewer options you decide to show, the more space will be dedicated to the Web pages themselves.
If you want even fewer of the options to appear, point your mouse at the border between the Web page and the button options until you see your cursor turn into a double-headed arrow. Click and drag up until the Address: box disappears. You should be left with the screen that appears in Figure 6.9.
Figure 6.9. If you want to view only the toolbar, click and drag again.
One more thing. You can also use these same steps to make the words under the toolbar buttons disappear. Just click and drag up until you can't go any more and everything but the buttons themselves will be hidden. As previously mentioned, you can still click and drag to make them appear again.
The toolbar buttons are probably the most useful of any of the options I've talked about so far in this section. Here's a quick rundown of what each button on the toolbar does.
| (Back) Return to the previous page displayed. Click the Back button repeatedly to review the pages you've seen most recently. |
| (Forward) This button works only if you've just used the Back button. It takes you to the page you were on just before you clicked the Back button. |
| (Stop) Stop downloading (or trying to download) a page. If you are having trouble reaching an address, click this button and then try following the link or entering the address again. (Sometimes you will get a better connection, even if only a few seconds have passed.) You can also click this button if you decide not to wait for a long page to finish displaying. |
| (Refresh) Download and display all the text and images on the current page again. You need to click this button only if there seems to be some problem with the page or if you think the page might have changed since it was loaded the first time. (Because some pages use programs to constantly update or alter their contents, refreshing might display new information.) |
| (Home) Go to the page specified under View | Options | Start and Search Pages (Start Page option) as your home page location. This is the same page that appears when you first start the Internet Explorer program. |
| (Search) When you click this button, you will go to the page specified in Find View | Options | Start and Search Pages (Search Page option). This is your one-step key to searching the Internet. (See Chapter 8, "Searching the Internet" for more details.) |
| (Favorites) This option opens your Favorites in the Explorer Window. You can then double-click a favorite to instantly go to it. |
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| (Font) This button enables you to adjust the size of the font that Explorer displays. Click on the button until the text is the size you want it. |
It might help you to discuss the Forward and Back buttons in a little more detail. As was mentioned, to go back to a previous page, click on the Back button in the upper-left corner of the Explorer window. If you use the Back button to return to a page, you can then use the Forward button to follow the same link again. For example, you can flip between two pages by hitting Back, Forward, Back, Forward over and over again.
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Quite often, a page can contain links going back to the pages from which you just came. However, using the Back and Forward buttons is faster than clicking on those links because Explorer stores the most recently visited pages in your computer's memory for quick retrieval.
How many pages back does Internet Explorer keep in memory? That depends on the settings in View | Options | Advanced | Amount of disk space to use. The more disk space you give it, the more pages Explorer can keep on your computer for instant access.
Like the toolbar, Quick Links give you one-click access to different functions. These buttons, however, aren't really navigational in nature, as are the toolbar buttons. Instead, these buttons take you to a specific place. Here's a brief description of each Quick Link.
| (Today's Links) This button takes you to http://home.microsoft.com/links/links.asp sort of a "cool places to go" page. The links on this page change continually. |
| (Services) Go to http://home.microsoft.com/lookup/services.asp to access some of Microsoft's services, such as travel and financial information and an address look-up service. |
| (Web Tutorial) You can go to Microsoft's Internet tutorial page with this button (although after reading this book, you won't need to!) |
| (Product Updates) Going here will keep you up-to-date on the latest Microsoft Internet Explorer-related releases and news. |
| (Microsoft) This button always takes you to Microsoft's main home page. |
One of the most common complaints about reading documents on a computer instead of on paper is that you can see only one relatively low-resolution page at a time. Internet Explorer obviously can't increase the resolution or size of your computer screen, but it can put multiple documents or multiple parts of a single document on the screen at once.
When you decide you want to view more than one page at a time, you can open multiple windows. The author of a Web site can also organize the pages themselves into multiple views, called frames, which pop up automatically on one Explorer page. The next sections look at how to handle both of them.
As explained in Chapter 7, "Favorite Places," you can use your right mouse button for a variety of purposes. This section takes a look at one of those right-click options, Open In New Window.
Move your pointer to any link and, instead of clicking on it as you normally would, click on it with your right mouse button. You will see a small menu appear. If you click on the Open In New Window item, the link is opened in a brand-new Explorer Window, complete with its own menu, scrollbars, and the whole works. This new Explorer window can lay on top of the original Explorer window, or you can place them side by side for a full view of both.
This gives you an easy way to keep one main page visible while exploring some of its links. For example, suppose you wanted to look at some of the music resources in the National Music and Entertainment Directory discussed in a previous section. First, you would click on the M link to get a listing of Music resources. (If you can't find it or are now somewhere else, go to the following address so you can see the directory listed in Figure 6.10):
http://www.musicyellowpages.com/ypdirect.htm#m
Because it's very likely that you might have to try several sources and might want to keep this index visible while you are looking at some of the links, this would be a great time to use multiple windows. You can keep the main list visible while also looking at some of the music links by right-clicking on the link you want and then selecting Open In New Window.
For example, say you wanted to look at CD Compilations. You would scroll down the M directory until you see Music (Clubs, CDIS/Compilation CDs, 45s, Remixers, Remix Services, 12" singles). Right-click on that link and select Open In New Window. By tiling the two windows next to each other, you can scroll through each of them independently (see Figure 6.11).
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All the major windowing operating systems have commands to automatically tile windows, as shown in Figure 6.11. In Windows 95, right-click on the taskbar and select Tile Horizontally or Tile Vertically. When you're finished viewing the windows side by side, the taskbar menu also makes it possible for you to Undo Tiling.
To keep the index in view, be sure to always click on it with the right mouse button and use Open In New Window instead of Open.
When authors and publishers create Web sites, they want to make them as easy for you to view as possible. They realize that most people won't know how (or make the effort) to keep the table of contents in sight by opening multiple windows. Fortunately, Microsoft gives those authors a way to automatically create multiple views of a page or set of pages whenever you view them with Internet Explorer 3.0.
As Figure 6.12 shows, these automatic frames are not multiple windows—there's only one menu and one toolbar. However, each frame can have its own scrollbar and can be programmed so that clicking on its links can bring up pages in other frames. Clicking on the Apollo 13 link in the left frame of Figure 6.12, for example, brings up a different movie review in the right frame without changing the appearance of the left frame itself (see Figure 6.13).
Because frames appear and relate to one another automatically, using them is exactly like using any other page. You should just be aware that frames whose contents fit on the screen won't have any scrollbars, and so some multiframe pages might appear at first glance as if they were ordinary, single-frame pages. Other pages might have every frame scrollable. Figure 6.14 shows a site with a combination of both types of frames.
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If sites are poorly designed, it can be a bit confusing to figure out which links will modify the contents of which frames, and which links will take you away to single-frame pages elsewhere. But because all that happens automatically, being a little boggled isn't much of a problem. You can always click on the Back or Home buttons on the toolbar if there doesn't seem to be an obvious exit. Most sites that use frames do carefully arrange them and program them so that they are quite intuitive to navigate.
Sites that use frames will often also use other advanced features of Internet Explorer 3.0, such as dynamic documents, Java applets, and plug-ins. Part IV of this book, "Browsing Interactive Sites," shows you some examples of these. You can also learn about creating your own Web pages with frames in Chapter 23, "Tables, Frames and Style Sheets," and scripting more advanced interactive Web pages in Part VII, "Web Scripting and Active X."
This chapter explains how to navigate the Web most efficiently with Internet Explorer. Chapter 7, "Favorite Places," shows you how to use it faster and more efficiently with some of Explorer's added features.
