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"When a subject is
highly controversial . . . one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one
came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the
chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices,
the idiosyncrasies of the speaker."
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), British novelist. A Room of One’s Own,
ch. 1 (1929).
From the earliest days when college students would post lists of the records they owned to the present, the World Wide Web is a place of fun, fantasy, and sometimes fear. It has been a short but very wild ride.
For those who've watched commerce arrive, tricks of navigation being implemented over time, and the addition of multimedia presentations and live video, a blink of the eye will cause one to miss yet another innovation. For those just arriving, it's a loud, very confusing, and often threatening place.
We tell those just starting out to think of the Web as a the world's biggest bookstore after it has been hit by a tornado.
There are sites (think: 'books') which have truly wonderful things and there are those which are pure, unadulterated filth! There is love and hate; there is greed and avarice side by side with technical help and some outstanding art; there is nudity and profanity side-by-side with religion and deity. It's a huge cornucopia of ideas, dreams, wishes, and opinions - but finding your way around is often difficult and VERY confusing.
Here we don't attempt to provide a primer on web browsing (or 'surfing' as it's commonly called); what we do want you to understand is that IT'S NOT YOU that is the only one confused by the lack of standard 'street signs'.
If, however, you'd like to find your way back to this page, you'll want to hold down your CONTROL key (usually found to the right and left of your space bar on your keyboard) and while holding it down with one hand, type the letter "D" (it can be in small or capital letters). Then release both. Now, you've BOOKMARKED this page and when you start your browser again, you can look under the BOOKMARKS and find a note which matches that shown in the very top border of this page.
Of course, as our resident 'net wizard' points out, although this methodology will work with Netscape 4 and Internet Explorer 3, it might not work for other browsers - Unix, Mac, etc. We don't know about IE4 but it doesn't work with Opera which requires a CTRL-T.
Good luck with your browsing. The more you do, the more you'll see and learn!
It's important to know that - just like with books - not everything you read on the Internet is the truth. With books, there's generally some type of editorial oversight which washes out the most blatant error (except in the case of self-published works - 'vanity press' books - which are also self-limiting in that funds are needed).
On the internet, there are college professors and pre-teens (and the latter are often better at web design than the former!). Be careful about taking anything literally - and verify those things you find.
For more information, please see:
Just
click on "Prince, the Search Dog" to find things on our site. He's on every page
and he'll take you directly to our search form where you can see if we've
written about whatever it is you're interested in. Prince has a great memory; he
always remembers where things are!