CYBERQUIZ –2: THE WORLD WIDE WEB by Dr D.C.Misra

If the Internet is the outward trappings of new technology, the World
Wide Web, simply called the Web, is its soul. And what a soul! Its
revolutionary feature is multi – media convergence. Be it a
newspaper, a radio, a television, a telephone, a book, you name it
and the Web has it, all in one place, the screen of the
computer.While the Web is no longer a novelty, the following
questions may have some surprises. Let us check.

1.(a) What has been called The Rosetta Stone of the Internet, and (b)
What is the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web?

2.What is the difference between WorldWideWeb (one word) and World
Wide Web (three words)?

3.(a) Who invented the World Wide Web and when, and (b) What for was
the World Wide Web originally invented?

4.(a) Which are the alternative names which Tim Berners–Lee, the
father of the World Wide Web, consider for the World Wide Web, and
(b) When did the World Wide Web become public?

5.What are deep Web and surface Web?

6.How does deep Web compare with surface Web and how many deep Web
sites exist at present?

7.(a) What is the size of the World Wide Web, and (b) How much of the
World Wide Web is indexed?

8.(a) How much of the World Wide Web is covered by the search
engines, and (b) The number of devices used to access the World Wide
Web in 1997 was 78 million. What was the expected number by 2002?

9.(a) What is the average duration of page view and time spent during
surfing session by a Web surfer, and (b) How many sessions per month
does a Web surfer undertake and how many Web pages does he view per
month?

10.(a) How much time does a Web surfer spend per month surfing the
Web, and (b) What is the percentage of surfers who would gladly watch
less TV for the World Wide Web given a choice between the two?

11.How many Web sites are visited by most people per World Wide Web
visit?

12.(a) How much time is spent to load the home page of a typical
website and what is threshold believed to represent natural human
reading / scanning speeds, and (b) Who surf more at home – the lower
income surfers or more affluent people?

13.Who are better at adapting to new technology, women or men?

14.What is Web Services Interoperability (WSI) organisation?

15.(a) In ancient days, a pen was made from quill, the hollow shaft
of a feather, but what is e-quill, and (b) What is Emule?

16.VerySign, Inc., a Mountain View, CA-based firm, which operates
much of the Internet, infrastructure, was processing 600 million
domain requests per day in early 2000. How many domain requests is it
processing now?

17.Which was the world's first Web site?

18.What has been hailed as the Woodstock of the World Wide Web?

19.(a) If it has been described as "the longest running vaporware
project in the history of computing" and also as "an amazing epic
tragedy," what is Xanadu, and (b) What is the difference berween
World Wide Web and Xanadu?

20.What are the following in Xanadu terminology: (a) transclusion,
(b) bert, (c) ernie, (d) humbers, and (e)
transcopyright?


ANSWERS TO CYBERQUIZ – 2: The World Wide Web

1. (a) The World Wide Web. (The Rosetta Stone, incidentally, is a
stone discovered in 1799 near Rosetta, Egypt, which provided the key
for deciphering hieroglyphs. It was deciphered by cryptologist Jean
Francois Champollion in 1822. It carried a decree from the reign of
Ptolemy V Epiphanes (204 – 180 BC) in three scripts – Hieroglyphs,
demotic and Greek, and (b) The Internet is a network of computer
networks. Essentially it consists of computers and cables. The World
Wide Web, on the other hand, is the information space created by the
Internet, which consists of documents, sound, video, etc. On the
Internet the connections are through cables, and on the World Wide
Web through hypertext links. The Web could not be without the Net.

2.WorldWideWeb (one word) was the first Web client, a browser-editor
that ran on a Next machine while the World Wide Web (three words) is
one of the important services available on the Internet.

3.Tim Berners – Lee, a graduate of Oxford University, while working
at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, invented the World
Wide Web in 1989. For further details visit his web site
http://www.w3.org/people/Berners-Lee. He is now working in MIT. The
World WideWeb was originally invented for sharing high-energy physics
data at CERN.

4.(a) Mine of Information ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste), The
Information Mine, and Information Mesh, and (b) 15th January 1991
when the line-mode browser developed at CERN was made available by
the process known as anonymous FTP.(Source: John Naughton 1999).

5.According to a study by NEC, the existing search engines can dig at
the best only 16 per cent of information from the World Wide Web.
This is called surface Web. Bright Planet
(http://www.brightplanet.com/deepcontent/index.asp), a Sioux Falls,
South Dakota-based private company founded in 1999, has come out with
the concept of deep Web which is where most of the information in the
Web lies buried, untapped by traditional search engines.

6.(a) The deep Web is currently 400 to 560 times larger than the
surface Web, (b) The deep Web contains 7,500 terabytes of
information, compared to 19 terabytes of information in the surface
Web, and (c) The deep Web contains nearly 550 billion individual
documents compared to the one billion of the surface Web. An
estimated 100,000 deep Web sites presently exist. A full 95 per cent
of the deep Web is publicly accessible information – not subject to
fees or subscriptions. For details, check the Web site
http://www.completeplanet.com for further information.

7.(a) 800 million pages, and (b) Much of the Web is not indexable.
The study done by Steve Lawrence and C .Lee Giles of NEC Research
Institute published in July 8, 1999 issue of Nature on WWW Search
Engine Coverage reported that, as of February 1999, only 42 per cent
of the Web was indexed by the combined search engines.

8.(a) Search engines at the most cover only 16 per cent of the World
Wide Web, and (b) More than 515 million.

9.(a) 50 seconds at home and 54 seconds at work; 29 minutes 51 second
at home and 31 minutes 20 seconds at work, and (b) 18 at home and 40
at work; 664 at home and 1,387 at work (Source: Nielson / Net Ratings
Inc., May 2000).

10.(a) 9 hours 5 minutes 42 seconds at home; 20 hours 50 minutes 48
seconds at work (Source: Nielsen / Net Ratings Inc.) (May 2000), and
(b) 62 per cent, according to a survey conducted by Greenfield Online
for the game site pogo.com.

11.Just three (Source: Nielson / Net Ratings).

12.(a) In the range of 8 seconds, which is nearly ten times the
threshold believed to represent natural human reading / scanning
speeds (Source: Jupiter Communications,
http://www.cddcenter.com/cdd101.htm), and (b) People with lower
incomes spend more time surfing the Web at home than more affluent
people, according to a study (n =57,000 at-home computer users) by
Nielson / Net Ratings, the Internet audience measurement service. The
reason ascribed for the finding is that the lower–income surfers find
enough services and content to keep them there.(Source : WSJ.com).

13.It is ladies first in new technology! The findings of an annual
study, Embracing the Information Age: A Comparison of Women and Men
Business Owners, commissioned by IBM and conducted by NFWBO indicates
that women are better at adapting to new technology than men. Here
are some of the findings of the study. Business homepages: 23/16,
Frequent e-mail use: 51/40, Net use for research: 22/14, Net use for
opportunities: 9/3, and Technical inputs for growth: 17/10.(The first
figure, in percentage, pertains to women while the second figure,
also in percentage, pertains to men).(Source: Vasisht, Divya (2003):
Technically, it's women on top, The Times of India, New Delhi, July
22, Tuesday, Delhi Times, p-1).

14.It is an organisation formed by Microsoft Corp, IBM and host of
rival technology competitors including Intel Corp, Oracle Corp, SAP
AG, Hewlett – Packard Co, and Fujitsu Business Systems to work on
standards to make it easier for companies share information and do
business over the Web. Sun Microsystems Inc., the inventor of Java,
and a rival of Microsoft is yet to join the organisation (Source:
Seobhan Kennedy, New York, Reuters / The Economic Times, February 8,
2002).

15.(a) It is a Web tool, which enables one to mark up Web pages as if
they were pieces of paper. It is a proprietory item of E-Quill
Corporation but a free version is available for download from the Web
site http://www.e-quill.com, (b) It is a software, a small Java-
based applet, developed by Slangsoft, an Israel's software company,
which can be integrated with any Web-based appliance – e-mail, chat,
etc. – to provide text input in 47 national languages including
Indian scripts like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, etc. (Source: Prasanjit
Bhattacharya, The Economic Times, September 30, 2000).

16.Nine billion per day. (Thomas L.Friedman, Op-Ed columnist (2003):
Opinion: Is Google God? The New York Times, June 29, Sunday,
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/Opinion/29FRIE.html?8hpib).

17.info.cern.ch. This was put online on August 6, 1991. "It provided
an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how to get your own
browser, how to set up your own server and so on," according to
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners_Lee#The_ first_website).

18. The world's First International World-Wide Web conference held at
CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory at Geneva, Switzerland
in May, 1994. It was attended by 400 users and developers. (Source:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/about/achievements/www/history/histor
y.html).

[The Woodstock Music and Art Fair was held on 15-18 August 1969 in 38
acre of Max Yasgur's farm in Bethel in Sullivan county, New York at a
cost of more than $2.4 million drawing more than 450,000 people. The
term "Woodstock" has become "an instant adjective denoting youthful
hedonism and 60's excess." The Fair gets its name from Catskill
Hamlet of Woodstock, which is 60 miles west of the venue of the
festival.For an account of Woodstock, visit
http://www.Woodstock69.com]

19.(a) A global hypertext publishing system conceived by Theodor
(Ted) Holm Nelson (1937- ), the hypertext guru, in 1960. According to
its Web site, "It has unbreakable links, copyright simplification and
softening, origin connection, two-way links, side-side
intercomparison, deep version manageent, and incremental publishing"
(http://xanadu.com/nxu/index.html). It is thus conceptualised as a
universal library of non-sequential writing, which keeps a track of
successive versions and envisages a royalty system for payment to
authors for use of their material. It has been named after the palace
in British poet S.T.Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan (1798) "to represent
magic place of literary memory and freedom, where nothing would be
forgotton." (http://xanadu.com/thehistory.html). Ted Nelson released
the source code of Xanadu in 1999.
Gary Wolf, executive editor of HotWired in his feature The
Curse of Xanadu in WIRED Magazine (June 1995, Issue 3.06) has
described Xanadu as vapourware and epic tragedy as described in the
question (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/Xanadu.html). This
assessment, which appears to be quite fair and objective, has,
however, been hotly contested by Ted Nelson
(http://ted.hyperland.com/whatsay/).
(b) The basic difference between the World Wide Web and Xanadu, both
of which are hypertext systems, is that in the case of the Web,
documents can and are renamed or deleted. In the process, the links
are lost. In Xanadu, on the other hand, documents cannot be deleted
by the users. (Source: Relihan, as quoted on
http://www.zeltser.com/WWW/#Weaknesses_WWW). Also the hypertext
system is quite simple in the Web as compared to Xanadu. Ted Nelson
has said that the World Wide Web is "trivial simplification of his
hypertext ideas."

20.(a) Quoting a document or a part of it in another document by
means of a pointer, that is, without copying it. It is thus virtual
inclusion, which leaves the original untouched. Further, every
quotation will entitle the original author for payment of royalty,
(b) A file in Xanadu system, (c) The unit of information in Xanadu
publishing system for which users would be billed, (d) Humonogous
numbers - arbitrarily large forking-number-system-based number for an
infinite number of unique IDs for labeling stored text, and (e) A
comprehensive solution for rights management in purchases, ownership,
quotation and version management.

(c)D.C.Misra 2004

Desclaimer: While every care has been taken to compile the quiz,
readers are requested to check the authenticity of information before
acting upon it.