NCSA Mosaic for the X Window System User's Guide
On occasion you may want to open a document directly instead of connecting
to a document through a series of hyperlinks. To do this, use the Uniform
Resource Locator, or URL for short. URLs combine the protocol, name
of the machine serving the file to the Internet, and the path and filename.
To open a document directly, select Open from the File
menu and enter the URL in the URL To Open field that appears
in the dialog box. Your cursor must be in the field in the
dialog box to type.
A URL consists of a reference to the type of server being accessed
and, essentially, the path for the specific document. Sometimes the
port number of the server is also included, and sometimes a filename
is not included because a default file to open has been set in a directory.
When you click on a hyperlink, NCSA Mosaic interprets the URL and retrieves
the document by connecting to the Internet server that is specified
in the URL. The file is then shown to you.
The required URL format is:
scheme://host.domain[:port]/path/filename
where scheme is one of the following:
- Name
- Server Type
- file
- your local system or an anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol)
server
- FTP
- an anonymous FTP server
- HTTP
- a World Wide Web server (HTTP stands for hypertext transportprotocol)
- gopher
- a Gopher server
- news
- an NNTP news server
- telnet
- opens a telnet session
- WAIS
- a WAIS (Wide Area Information Server) server
For example, the URL for the NCSA home page is:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/NCSAHome.html
where:
- http is the type of server being run (a Web server)
-
- www.ncsa.uiuc.edu is the Internet address of the NCSA
Web server
-
- /General is the directory containing the Home Page
-
- NCSAHome.html is the file served to you
-
For more information about URLs, refer to A Beginner's Guide
to URLs on the NCSA Mosaic Help menu or to the original
URL information file from CERN (available as a hyperlink at the end
of the Beginner's Guide).
The cursor becomes a small hand when you have it over a hyperlink.
The URL of the document under the hand pointer is shown in the information
line on the Document View window. This tells you where NCSA Mosaic
will go to retrieve this document.
Another way to see a the URL for a document is to open the document
source file by choosing View Source... from the File
menu. The Document Source window displays the coded file that is being
interpreted by NCSA Mosaic
(see ``HyperText Markup Language''
for more information on the coded file).
National Center for Supercomputing Applications / mosaic-x@ncsa.uiuc.edu