Running Linux, Third Edition

Chapter 16. The World Wide Web and Electronic Mail

The previous chapter put you on a network. It may have been hard work, but the result was quite an accomplishment: your system is now part of a community. If you are connected to the Internet, the next step is to get access to all the riches this medium offers. People generally agree that the most useful applications on the Internet are the World Wide Web and electronic mail; they are the subjects of this chapter.

The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web (WWW or Web, for short) is a relative newcomer to the Internet information hierarchy. The WWW project’s goal is to unite the many disparate services available on the Internet into a single, worldwide, multimedia, hypertext space. In this section we’ll show you how to access the WWW with your Linux machine. We’ll also describe how to configure your own WWW server to provide documents to the Web.

The World Wide Web project was started in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Center for Particle Physics (CERN). The original goal of the project was to allow groups of researchers in the particle-physics community to share many kinds of information through a single, homogeneous interface.

Before the Web, each type of information available via the Internet was provided by its own unique client/server pair. For example, to retrieve files via FTP, one used the FTP client, which connected to the ftpd daemon on the server machine. Gopher (an old hierarchical document system that was considered ...