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

Most certainly, everybody who has even the slightest connection with computers has used the World Wide Web by now. Like word processors or spreadsheets some centuries ago, the Web is what gets many people to use computers at all in the first place. We’ll cover here some of the tools you can use to access the Web on Linux.

Linux was from the beginning intimately connected to the Internet in general and the Web in particular. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) provides various Linux-related documents via the Web. The LDP home page, located at http://www.tldp.org, contains links to a number of other Linux-related pages around the world. The LDP home page is shown in Figure 16-1.

LDP home page on the World Wide Web

Figure 16-1. LDP home page on the World Wide Web

Linux web browsers usually can display information from several types of servers, not just HTTP servers sending clients HTML pages. For example, when accessing a document ...

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