Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours

Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours

By Greg Perry

Surfing the Internet

Remember that the Web is a collection of interconnected Web pages. Almost every Web page contains links to other sites. These links (also called hot links, hypertext links, and hyperlinks) are often underlined. You can locate these links by moving your mouse cursor over the underlined description. If the mouse cursor changes to a hand, you can click the hand to move to that page. After a brief pause, your Web browser displays the page.

Tip

A link is nothing more than a URL address to another Web site. The link often displays a description and not a technical URL address. (As you move your mouse cursor over a link, your Web browser's status bar displays the actual URL address to the link.) Therefore, you can traverse related Web pages without worrying about addresses; just click link descriptions to move to those sites.

Suppose that you view the home page of your financial broker. The page might include links to other related pages, such as stock quotation pages, company financial informational pages, and order-entry pages in which you can enter your own stock purchase requests.

One of the most useful features of Internet Explorer and every other Web browser is the browser's capability to return to sites you've visited, both in the current session and in former sessions. The toolbar's Back button returns you to a site you just visited, and you can keep clicking the Back button to return to pages you've visited during this session. The Forward toolbar button returns you to pages from which you've backed up.

Keep in mind that you can click the Address drop-down list box to see a list of URL addresses you've visited. In the History bar, you'll find addresses from the current as well as previous Internet Explorer Web sessions.

If you know the address of a Web site you want to view, you can type the site's address directly in the Address text box. When you press Enter or click Go, Internet Explorer takes you to that site and displays the Web page. In addition, you can select File, Open to display a URL dialog box and type an address in the dialog box. When you click OK, Internet Explorer displays the page associated with that address. From the Start menu, you can even enter a URL in the Run dialog box to see any page on the Web. If you want to return to your original home page, click the toolbar's Home button.

Note

As discussed previously, Internet Explorer more fully integrates into Windows XP and Windows applications than any previous Windows version. Most of the Microsoft Office products, for example, include an Internet Explorer-like interface in many areas, and they link directly to Internet Explorer when you perform certain Internet-related tasks from within an Office product. From Internet Explorer's File, Open dialog box, instead of entering a URL address, you can type a disk, pathname, and filename. If Internet Explorer recognizes the file's registered type as it will for common files such as Office data files, the file's contents appear inside your Internet Explorer browser. You then can traverse back and forth between files on your disk and Web pages without ever leaving your browser.

If you find a location you really like and want to return to, save that location in Internet Explorer's Favorites list. For example, perhaps you run across a site that discusses your favorite television show and you want to return to that site again quickly. Just click the Favorites toolbar button to display the Favorites bar, click the Add button, enter a description, and click OK to add the site to your Favorites list. The Favorites bar differs from your History bar in that the History bar updates over time as you visit Web sites, keeping at most three weeks'worth of visited site addresses. Your Favorites bar keeps track of any Web site you store there until you change the Favorites list. That means you can return to a favorite page years after you stored the page's address in your Favorites bar.

You can practice moving among Web pages by using the Internet Explorer browser. After you visit a site, you can return to that site very simply. The following To Do item demonstrates how you traverse the Web using Internet Explorer.

To Do: Moving Between Pages

  1. If you have not started Internet Explorer, start it and log on to the Internet.
  2. Click the Address list box to highlight your Start page's URL address.
  3. Type the following Web page address: http://www.firstgov.com. A Government Web page appears, as shown in Figure 11.4. (Depending on the changes that have been made to the site recently, the site might not match Figure 11.4 exactly.)
11fig04.jpg

Figure 11.4 http://www.firstgov.com provides links to all the Government's Web pages.

Caution

Often, you see Web addresses prefaced with the text http://. This prefix enables you and your browser to both know that the address to the right of the second slash is a Web page's URL address. Internet Explorer does not require the http:// prefix before URLs. Be sure to type forward slashes and not the MS-DOS backslashes you might be used to typing on PCs.

Tip

Most Web addresses begin with www and end with com, although many other Web site suffixes exist, such as gov and edu. Knowing that com is the most common, Microsoft added a time-saving feature to the Address list box: Type the middle portion of any Web site that follows the general format http://www.sitename.com, such as firstgov, and then press Ctrl+Enter. Internet Explorer surrounds your entry with the needed http://www and com to complete the address.

  1. Click any link on the page (indicated by a hand mouse pointer or a text color change when you move the mouse over a link's hot spot). After a brief pause, you see the linked Web page.
  2. Click the toolbar's Back button. Almost instantly, the first page appears.
  3. After you're back at the original page, practice building a favorite site list by clicking the Favorites toolbar button.
  4. Instead of using the toolbar's Favorites button, select the Favorites, Add to Favorites menu option. Internet Explorer displays the Add to Favorites dialog box.
  5. Type a description for the page such as Government Link Page. Instead of typing a new description, you can always keep the default title that appears; often, this title is rather lengthy for a Favorites list.
  6. Click the Create In button to display a list of folders in which you can store the page. (You can create new folders by clicking the New Folder button and entering a folder name.)
  7. Click OK.
  8. Click the Favorites toolbar button to display the Favorites bar once again. You'll see the new entry in its folder. When you select that favorite entry, Internet Explorer looks up the entry's stored URL address and goes to that Web page.

Tip

If you add too many favorites, your Favorites list might become unmanageable. Utilize the Folders option to organize your Web content. By setting up a series of folders named by subjects, you can group your favorite Web sites by subject.

Internet Explorer makes your Favorites list available in three places:

Windows XP does not automatically display your Favorites list, but you can request that Windows XP do this as an option on the Start menu. Open your Control Panel's Taskbar and Start menu window. Click the Customize button, click the Advanced tab, and click the Favorites menu option under the list labeled Show These Items on the Start Menu. (See Figure 11.5.) After adding your favorite Web sites to your Start menu, you can open any of those Web pages by selecting the page from your Windows Start menu without first having to start Internet Explorer. As soon as you select a Web page, Windows automatically starts Windows Explorer and loads the Web page.

11fig05.gif

Figure 11.5 You can display your list of favorite Web pages from your Windows Start menu.

As with all the Windows XP menus, the Internet Explorer menus are personalized to display only your most recent selections. By providing only the most recently accessed sites, the sites you are most likely to look for again, Internet Explorer keeps you moving quickly to the information you want to access. If you've turned off the Windows XP personalized menus on the Start menu's Settings, Taskbar and Start Menu option, Internet Explorer always displays all your favorites when you select from the Favorites menu option.

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