Book Details

"The Mosaic Handbook for the X Window System describes how to navigate the World Wide Web using Mosaic, the graphical interface designed at NCSA.

Mosaic is designed to navigate the hyperlinks that connect the systems on the World Wide Web. Using Mosaic's point-and-click interface, a user can move from document to document, viewing text, graphics, video, audio, or the combination of any of these media, without having to worry about where that information is located. The Mosaic user gains access to the information on thousands of Internet servers found all over the world with no greater knowledge than is contained within the pages of this short book.

Until recently, the Internet was largely a command-line phenomenon. A user needed to know a different tool for each operation (s)he wanted to perform, and each tool had its own obscure command-line interface. For the most part, where the tools displayed information at all, that information was text-based.

Mosaic has changed all that. In addition to its interface to the World Wide Web, Mosaic provides a graphical interface to most Internet utilities, like FTP, Gopher, Archie, Veronica, and WAIS. Users no longer need to know UNIX command-line syntax to perform common tasks on the Internet. This book describes how to use Mosaic to accomplish these tasks.

A chapter in the book introduces the reader to HTML, the hypertext authoring language used by WWW documents. The reader will learn enough about HTML to create his/her own home page, thus becoming a potential information provider on the WWW! This book also explains how to customize and extend Mosaic to allow, for example, the use of other viewers and browsers.

The book includes a CDcontaining Spyglass(TM) Mosaic(TM) V2.4 for the X Window System and a subscription to the Global Network Navigator (TM) (GNN (R)), the leading WWW-based information service on the Internet. (When a version is available, we will supply Enhanced NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System, V1.0.)