21st Century World Wide Web

Lunch & Learn presentation by Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian

New Browsers

Why switch from Internet Explorer? IE has a lot of well-known security holes that can be exploited by viruses or spyware. These exploits range from the merely irritating to the completely crippling. Older versions of IE also don't support current web standards well (see below), and if you are using Netscape 4, you aren't seeing much of what the web currently has to offer because your browser is so outdated. Lastly, new browsers have some great features like pop-up blocking, ad/image blocking, tabbed browsing, and Firefox's extensions that allow you to customize your browser.

Now is a particularly good time to switch to Firefox, as that browser has just released a stable "1.0" version. If you chose to try it out, look at their Firefox Central page for some good "getting started" information.

The only downside is that some people have created websites that use Internet Explorer's quirks, and don't work with other browsers. So you won't want to delete IE from your machine entirely.

CSS and Web Standards

When the web was first created, web authors didn't have a way to control things like fonts, colors, etc. The idea was that the browser and the individual browsing the web would control the formatting, while the underlying HTML was really just concerned with content. As the web grew so quickly, this idea was put aside for a time, and the "form" and "content" became intermingled. At the same time, people began to write web pages with certain browser "quirks" in mind.

The idea of web standards is to put an end to all that and separate content and display as much as possible. One of the main tools to do that is CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets.

Weblogs or Blogs

Blogs have become more mainstream since I did a weblog lunch & learn in early 2003. The most common form for a blog is a page with short "posts" consisting of short essays or links with commentary. The posts are almost always arranged in reverse-chronological order. Some blogs read like diaries, some like directories, some like newspaper columns. If you want to keep up-to-date on what is happening on the web, blogs will be your primary source of information.

An information science professor at the University of Iceland has put together an almost comically exhaustive page about weblogs (with a library slant).

Listed below are some good starting points if you want to see what blogs are all about. WARNING: while none of these sites are pornographic or offensive in themselves, many bloggers are interested in countercultural or underground material. The acronym NSFW next to a link means Not Safe For Work, i.e., R- or X-rated.

Technorati's Top 100 Weblogs: Technorati has an automated system of keeping track of which sites are the most linked-to. These top 100 have the most people linking to them.
Kottke: Jason Kottke is one of the first prominent bloggers, and his weblog is a fairly classic example.
BoingBoing: My favorite weblog, the four people who run BoingBoing consistently link to interesting things on the web.
Metafilter: a community weblog with links and discussion/flamewars.

Get your own blog at:

Blogger (free)
Movable Type (free for individuals, but you have to have a place to host it)

RSS

There's no widespread agreement on what RSS stands for, but "Really Simple Syndication" is the leading candidate. The idea is that if you routinely check the same 10 news sites or weblogs every day, it would be easier if you could go to one place to review all those headlines, and then choose the stories that you'd like to read, than it would be to go to ten different sites. RSS uses XML to encode information that is then read by an RSS reader or aggreator. See the Christian Science Monitor's RSS Primer for a good, quick overview.

Most sites show that they have an RSS feed available with a little RSS or XML icon (like this ) that links to the RSS feed. Otherwise, look for a link with text saying "syndicate this site" or something like that.

Bloglines (entirely web-based)
FeedDemon (for Windows)
NetNewsWire & NetNewsWire Lite (Mac only)
SharpReader (for Windows)
Kinja is kind of like an RSS reader/blog aggregator. Your options might be more limited than with a full-fleged RSS reader, but it is easy to set up and access from anywhere.

Wikis

A wiki is a collaborative web site; i.e., a site where users can edit and change the content on the fly. Some wikis only allow certain groups of users to make changes, but most let anyone make changes.

Wikipedia, an online encyclopeida, is the best-known wiki. It has been the subject of much debate on the web recently; a former editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has called it the faith-based encyclopedia. As a librarian, I think it provides a great way to start a conversation on what is "reliable" information, and why we might trust one source more than another.

While it doesn't look like there is an equivalent of Blogger for wiki, i.e., a site where you can quickly and easily create a wiki for free, the WikiScience section of WikiBooks has a page on How to Start a Wiki that might help the adventurous.

Useful Websites

TinyURL and MakeAShorterLink both do the same thing: take those absurdly long URLs that break when you copy and paste them into emails and make them much shorter. I prefer TinyURL, both because it is tinier, and they have a great bookmarklet.
Google News uses artificial intelligence to grab headlines from news sites all over the web and display the most-reported stories on the front page.
BugMeNot provides you with generic login and password information when you visit a site (like the New York Times) that requires you to log in to read their content. They also have a handy bookmarklet and Firefox extension.
Internet Archive & Wayback Machine let you see what the web looked like way back when.
Snopes Urban Legends Reference Pages isn't new, but it sure is useful for figuring out if Nigerians really do want to send you millions of dollars, or if Bill Gates is going to give everyone in the USA a dollar.