Bay Area Science Fiction Association ( BASFA ) is a science fiction fandom social club. The organization was founded after a committee meeting for the SiliCon science fiction convention in 1991 by several Bay Area convention organizers ( SMOFs ) looking for a reason to meet other than at committee meetings. The club has met weekly since 1991, at various locations in the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area.
61-621: BASFA has an elected president, vice-president, treasurer, and secretary, who serve until a new election is called or until that official has missed thirteen consecutive meetings. Terms of service often last several years uninterrupted. The club's activities revolve mainly around social meetings held at a restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley). Meetings themselves involve recreational parliamentary procedure, including official reports, announcements of upcoming events, reviews of books and movies of genre interest, and
122-583: A > . Such a collection of useful, related resources, interconnected via hypertext links is dubbed a web of information. Publication on the Internet created what Tim Berners-Lee first called the WorldWideWeb (in its original CamelCase , which was subsequently discarded) in November 1990. The hyperlink structure of the web is described by the webgraph : the nodes of the web graph correspond to
183-517: A disruptive technology to traditional publishing houses. The high cost of print publication and large Web readership has encouraged these publishers to embrace the World Wide Web as a marketing and content delivery system and another medium for delivering their advertisers' messages. In the late 1990s, e-zine publishers began adapting to the interactive and informative qualities of the internet instead of simply duplicating print magazines on
244-520: A home page containing a directory of the site web content . Some websites require user registration or subscription to access content. Examples of subscription websites include many business sites, news websites, academic journal websites, gaming websites, file-sharing websites, message boards , web-based email , social networking websites, websites providing real-time price quotations for different types of markets, as well as sites providing various other services. End users can access websites on
305-494: A web application . Consequently, a static web page displays the same information for all users, from all contexts, subject to modern capabilities of a web server to negotiate content-type or language of the document where such versions are available and the server is configured to do so. A server-side dynamic web page is a web page whose construction is controlled by an application server processing server-side scripts. In server-side scripting, parameters determine how
366-588: A web page on the World Wide Web normally begins either by typing the URL of the page into a web browser or by following a hyperlink to that page or resource. The web browser then initiates a series of background communication messages to fetch and display the requested page. In the 1990s, using a browser to view web pages—and to move from one web page to another through hyperlinks—came to be known as 'browsing,' 'web surfing' (after channel surfing ), or 'navigating
427-546: A browser called WorldWideWeb (which became the name of the project and of the network) and an HTTP server running at CERN. As part of that development he defined the first version of the HTTP protocol, the basic URL syntax, and implicitly made HTML the primary document format. The technology was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the whole Internet on 23 August 1991. The Web
488-625: A frenzy for the Web and started the dot-com bubble . Microsoft responded by developing its own browser, Internet Explorer , starting the browser wars . By bundling it with Windows, it became the dominant browser for 14 years. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which created XML in 1996 and recommended replacing HTML with stricter XHTML . In the meantime, developers began exploiting an IE feature called XMLHttpRequest to make Ajax applications and launched
549-591: A meeting-ending "rumor of the week". These, along with the designation of the previous meeting's minutes, tend to be hotly contested battles involving members buying votes. The minutes of BASFA are published in the online magazine Science Fiction/San Francisco . BASFA contributes yearly lists of recommendations for the Hugo Awards and has hosted appearances by authors such as Tad Williams . The association also regularly runs parties at local and international science fiction conventions . BASFA has been listed in
610-490: A network, a web browser can retrieve a web page from a remote web server . The web server may restrict access to a private network such as a corporate intranet. The web browser uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to make such requests to the web server . A static web page is delivered exactly as stored, as web content in the web server's file system . In contrast, a dynamic web page
671-627: A particular topic or purpose, ranging from entertainment and social networking to providing news and education. All publicly accessible websites collectively constitute the World Wide Web, while private websites, such as a company's website for its employees, are typically a part of an intranet . Web pages, which are the building blocks of websites, are documents , typically composed in plain text interspersed with formatting instructions of Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML , XHTML ). They may incorporate elements from other websites with suitable markup anchors . Web pages are accessed and transported with
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#1732790597147732-472: A public Internet Protocol (IP) network, such as the Internet , or a private local area network (LAN), by referencing a uniform resource locator (URL) that identifies the site. Websites can have many functions and can be used in various fashions; a website can be a personal website , a corporate website for a company, a government website, an organization website, etc. Websites are typically dedicated to
793-778: A quality control function to ensure that all material meets the expectations of the publishers (those investing time or money in its production) and the readership. Many large print publishers now provide digital reproduction of their print magazine titles through various online services for a fee. These service providers also refer to their collections of these digital format products as online magazines, and sometimes as digital magazines. Online magazines representing matters of interest to specialists or societies for academic subjects, science, trade, or industry are typically referred to as online journals . Many general interest online magazines provide free access to all aspects of their online content, although some publishers have opted to require
854-422: A range of devices, including desktop and laptop computers , tablet computers , smartphones and smart TVs . A web browser (commonly referred to as a browser ) is a software user agent for accessing information on the World Wide Web. To connect to a website's server and display its pages, a user needs to have a web browser program. This is the program that the user runs to download, format, and display
915-529: A subscription fee to access premium online article and/or multimedia content. Online magazines may generate revenue based on targeted search ads to website visitors, banner ads ( online display advertising ), affiliations to retail web sites, classified advertisements, product-purchase capabilities, advertiser directory links, or alternative informational/commercial purpose. Due to their low cost and initial non-mainstream targets, The original online magazines, e-zines and disk magazines (or diskmags), may be seen as
976-439: A translation that reflects the design concept and proliferation of the World Wide Web. Use of the www prefix has been declining, especially when web applications sought to brand their domain names and make them easily pronounceable. As the mobile Web grew in popularity, services like Gmail .com, Outlook.com , Myspace .com, Facebook .com and Twitter .com are most often mentioned without adding "www." (or, indeed, ".com") to
1037-429: A web browser in its address bar input field, some web browsers automatically try adding the prefix "www" to the beginning of it and possibly ".com", ".org" and ".net" at the end, depending on what might be missing. For example, entering "microsoft" may be transformed to http://www.microsoft.com/ and "openoffice" to http://www.openoffice.org . This feature started appearing in early versions of Firefox , when it still had
1098-429: A web page on the user's computer. In addition to allowing users to find, display, and move between web pages, a web browser will usually have features like keeping bookmarks, recording history, managing cookies (see below), and home pages and may have facilities for recording passwords for logging into web sites. The most popular browsers are Chrome , Firefox , Safari , Internet Explorer , and Edge . A Web server
1159-507: A year. Mosaic was a graphical browser that could display inline images and submit forms that were processed by the HTTPd server . Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape the following year and released the Navigator browser , which introduced Java and JavaScript to the Web. It quickly became the dominant browser. Netscape became a public company in 1995 which triggered
1220-628: Is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text , images , embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation , or web surfing, is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application software . The information in
1281-441: Is delivered with the page that can make additional HTTP requests to the server, either in response to user actions such as mouse movements or clicks, or based on elapsed time. The server's responses are used to modify the current page rather than creating a new page with each response, so the server needs only to provide limited, incremental information. Multiple Ajax requests can be handled at the same time, and users can interact with
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#17327905971471342-403: Is generated by a web application , usually driven by server-side software . Dynamic web pages are used when each user may require completely different information, for example, bank websites, web email etc. A static web page (sometimes called a flat page/stationary page ) is a web page that is delivered to the user exactly as stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are generated by
1403-450: Is not required by any technical or policy standard and many websites do not use it; the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch . According to Paolo Palazzi, who worked at CERN along with Tim Berners-Lee, the popular use of www as subdomain was accidental; the World Wide Web project page was intended to be published at www.cern.ch while info.cern.ch was intended to be the CERN home page; however
1464-464: Is officially spelled as three separate words, each capitalised, with no intervening hyphens. Nonetheless, it is often called simply the Web , and also often the web ; see Capitalization of Internet for details. In Mandarin Chinese, World Wide Web is commonly translated via a phono-semantic matching to wàn wéi wǎng ( 万维网 ), which satisfies www and literally means "10,000-dimensional net",
1525-533: Is the best known of such efforts. Many hostnames used for the World Wide Web begin with www because of the long-standing practice of naming Internet hosts according to the services they provide. The hostname of a web server is often www , in the same way that it may be ftp for an FTP server , and news or nntp for a Usenet news server . These hostnames appear as Domain Name System (DNS) or subdomain names, as in www.example.com . The use of www
1586-435: Is the standard markup language for creating web pages and web applications . With Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript , it forms a triad of cornerstone technologies for the World Wide Web. Web browsers receive HTML documents from a web server or from local storage and render the documents into multimedia web pages. HTML describes the structure of a web page semantically and originally included cues for
1647-431: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which may optionally employ encryption ( HTTP Secure , HTTPS) to provide security and privacy for the user. The user's application, often a web browser , renders the page content according to its HTML markup instructions onto a display terminal . Hyperlinking between web pages conveys to the reader the site structure and guides the navigation of the site, which often starts with
1708-523: The Locus Magazine online portal since 2002. BASFA's main sources of income are auctions of donated material and taxation of puns. The club has a "Numismatic Responsibility Act" that taxes members for the making of puns and for erratic marksmanship when paying said taxes. Online magazine An online magazine is a magazine published on the Internet , through bulletin board systems and other forms of public computer networks. One of
1769-490: The Web ) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to
1830-716: The Web 2.0 revolution. Mozilla , Opera , and Apple rejected XHTML and created the WHATWG which developed HTML5 . In 2009, the W3C conceded and abandoned XHTML. In 2019, it ceded control of the HTML specification to the WHATWG. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age and is the primary tool billions of people use to interact on the Internet . Tim Berners-Lee states that World Wide Web
1891-581: The web browsing history forward of the displayed page. Using Ajax technologies the end user gets one dynamic page managed as a single page in the web browser while the actual web content rendered on that page can vary. The Ajax engine sits only on the browser requesting parts of its DOM, the DOM, for its client, from an application server. Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is the umbrella term for technologies and methods used to create web pages that are not static web pages , though it has fallen out of common use since
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1952-473: The DNS records were never switched, and the practice of prepending www to an institution's website domain name was subsequently copied. Many established websites still use the prefix, or they employ other subdomain names such as www2 , secure or en for special purposes. Many such web servers are set up so that both the main domain name (e.g., example.com) and the www subdomain (e.g., www.example.com) refer to
2013-455: The HTML and the CSS standards, has encouraged the use of CSS over explicit presentational HTML since 1997. Most web pages contain hyperlinks to other related pages and perhaps to downloadable files, source documents, definitions and other web resources. In the underlying HTML, a hyperlink looks like this: < a href = "http://example.org/home.html" > Example.org Homepage </
2074-423: The HTTP service so that the receiving host can distinguish an HTTP request from other network protocols it may be servicing. HTTP normally uses port number 80 and for HTTPS it normally uses port number 443 . The content of the HTTP request can be as simple as two lines of text: The computer receiving the HTTP request delivers it to web server software listening for requests on port 80. If the web server can fulfil
2135-512: The URLs of other resources such as images, other embedded media, scripts that affect page behaviour, and Cascading Style Sheets that affect page layout. The browser makes additional HTTP requests to the web server for these other Internet media types . As it receives their content from the web server, the browser progressively renders the page onto the screen as specified by its HTML and these additional resources. Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
2196-535: The Web is transferred across the Internet using HTTP. Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name make up a website . A single web server may provide multiple websites, while some websites, especially the most popular ones, may be provided by multiple servers. Website content is provided by a myriad of companies, organizations, government agencies, and individual users ; and comprises an enormous amount of educational, entertainment, commercial, and government information. The Web has become
2257-451: The Web'. Early studies of this new behaviour investigated user patterns in using web browsers. One study, for example, found five user patterns: exploratory surfing, window surfing, evolved surfing, bounded navigation and targeted navigation. The following example demonstrates the functioning of a web browser when accessing a page at the URL http://example.org/home.html . The browser resolves
2318-675: The World Wide Web and web browsers . A web browser displays a web page on a monitor or mobile device . The term web page usually refers to what is visible, but may also refer to the contents of the computer file itself, which is usually a text file containing hypertext written in HTML or a comparable markup language . Typical web pages provide hypertext for browsing to other web pages via hyperlinks , often referred to as links . Web browsers will frequently have to access multiple web resource elements, such as reading style sheets , scripts , and images, while presenting each web page. On
2379-543: The appearance of the document. HTML elements are the building blocks of HTML pages. With HTML constructs, images and other objects such as interactive forms may be embedded into the rendered page. HTML provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links , quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags , written using angle brackets . Tags such as < img /> and < input /> directly introduce content into
2440-452: The assembly of every new web page proceeds, including the setting up of more client-side processing. A client-side dynamic web page processes the web page using JavaScript running in the browser. JavaScript programs can interact with the document via Document Object Model , or DOM, to query page state and alter it. The same client-side techniques can then dynamically update or change the DOM in
2501-623: The common tree structure approach, used for instance in the existing CERNDOC documentation system and in the Unix filesystem , as well as approaches that relied in tagging files with keywords , as in the VAX/NOTES system. Instead he adopted concepts he had put into practice with his private ENQUIRE system (1980) built at CERN. When he became aware of Ted Nelson 's hypertext model (1965), in which documents can be linked in unconstrained ways through hyperlinks associated with "hot spots" embedded in
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2562-669: The domain. In English, www is usually read as double-u double-u double-u . Some users pronounce it dub-dub-dub , particularly in New Zealand. Stephen Fry , in his "Podgrams" series of podcasts, pronounces it wuh wuh wuh . The English writer Douglas Adams once quipped in The Independent on Sunday (1999): "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for". The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used without much distinction. However,
2623-441: The first magazines to convert from a print magazine format to an online only magazine was the computer magazine Datamation . Some online magazines distributed through the World Wide Web call themselves webzines . An ezine (also spelled e- zine ) is a more specialized term appropriately used for small magazines and newsletters distributed by any electronic method, for example, by email. Some social groups may use
2684-510: The new system to documents organized in other ways (such as traditional computer file systems or the Usenet ). Finally, he insisted that the system should be decentralized, without any central control or coordination over the creation of links. Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to CERN in May 1989, without giving the system a name. He got a working system implemented by the end of 1990, including
2745-427: The page while data is retrieved. Web pages may also regularly poll the server to check whether new information is available. A website is a collection of related web resources including web pages , multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name , and published on at least one web server . Notable examples are wikipedia .org, google .com, and amazon.com . A website may be accessible via
2806-485: The page. Other tags such as < p > surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page. HTML can embed programs written in a scripting language such as JavaScript , which affects the behaviour and content of web pages. Inclusion of CSS defines the look and layout of content. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), maintainer of both
2867-542: The popularization of AJAX , a term which is now itself rarely used. Client-side-scripting, server-side scripting, or a combination of these make for the dynamic web experience in a browser. JavaScript is a scripting language that was initially developed in 1995 by Brendan Eich , then of Netscape , for use within web pages. The standardised version is ECMAScript . To make web pages more interactive, some web applications also use JavaScript techniques such as Ajax ( asynchronous JavaScript and XML ). Client-side script
2928-419: The public in 1991. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers . Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type
2989-458: The request and response. The HTTP protocol is fundamental to the operation of the World Wide Web, and the added encryption layer in HTTPS is essential when browsers send or retrieve confidential data, such as passwords or banking information. Web browsers usually automatically prepend http:// to user-entered URIs, if omitted. A web page (also written as webpage ) is a document that is suitable for
3050-431: The request it sends an HTTP response back to the browser indicating success: followed by the content of the requested page. Hypertext Markup Language ( HTML ) for a basic web page might look like this: The web browser parses the HTML and interprets the markup ( < title > , < p > for paragraph, and such) that surrounds the words to format the text on the screen. Many web pages use HTML to reference
3111-421: The same site; others require one form or the other, or they may map to different web sites. The use of a subdomain name is useful for load balancing incoming web traffic by creating a CNAME record that points to a cluster of web servers. Since, currently , only a subdomain can be used in a CNAME, the same result cannot be achieved by using the bare domain root. When a user submits an incomplete domain name to
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#17327905971473172-420: The same way. A dynamic web page is then reloaded by the user or by a computer program to change some variable content. The updating information could come from the server, or from changes made to that page's DOM. This may or may not truncate the browsing history or create a saved version to go back to, but a dynamic web page update using Ajax technologies will neither create a page to go back to nor truncate
3233-415: The server name of the URL ( example.org ) into an Internet Protocol address using the globally distributed Domain Name System (DNS). This lookup returns an IP address such as 203.0.113.4 or 2001:db8:2e::7334 . The browser then requests the resource by sending an HTTP request across the Internet to the computer at that address. It requests service from a specific TCP port number that is well known for
3294-572: The terms cyberzine and hyperzine when referring to electronically distributed resources. Similarly, some online magazines may refer to themselves as "electronic magazines", "digital magazines", or "e-magazines" to reflect their readership demographics or to capture alternative terms and spellings in online searches. An online magazine shares some features with a blog and also with online newspapers , but can usually be distinguished by its approach to editorial control. Magazines typically have editors or editorial boards who review submissions and perform
3355-625: The text, it helped to confirm the validity of his concept. The model was later popularized by Apple 's HyperCard system. Unlike Hypercard, Berners-Lee's new system from the outset was meant to support links between multiple databases on independent computers, and to allow simultaneous access by many users from any computer on the Internet. He also specified that the system should eventually handle other media besides text, such as graphics, speech, and video. Links could refer to mutable data files, or even fire up programs on their server computer. He also conceived "gateways" that would allow access through
3416-441: The two terms do not mean the same thing. The Internet is a global system of computer networks interconnected through telecommunications and optical networking . In contrast, the World Wide Web is a global collection of documents and other resources , linked by hyperlinks and URIs . Web resources are accessed using HTTP or HTTPS , which are application-level Internet protocols that use the Internet transport protocols. Viewing
3477-465: The web pages (or URLs) the directed edges between them to the hyperlinks. Over time, many web resources pointed to by hyperlinks disappear, relocate, or are replaced with different content. This makes hyperlinks obsolete, a phenomenon referred to in some circles as link rot, and the hyperlinks affected by it are often called "dead" links . The ephemeral nature of the Web has prompted many efforts to archive websites. The Internet Archive , active since 1996,
3538-534: The web. Publishers of traditional print magazines and entrepreneurs with an eye to a potential readership in the millions started publishing online magazines. Salon.com , founded in July 1995 by David Talbot, was launched with considerable media exposure and today reports 5.8 million monthly unique visitors. In the 2000s, some webzines began appearing in a printed format to complement their online versions. World Wide Web The World Wide Web ( WWW or simply
3599-417: The working title 'Firebird' in early 2003, from an earlier practice in browsers such as Lynx . It is reported that Microsoft was granted a US patent for the same idea in 2008, but only for mobile devices. The scheme specifiers http:// and https:// at the start of a web URI refer to Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP Secure , respectively. They specify the communication protocol to use for
3660-487: The world's dominant information systems platform . It is the primary tool that billions of people worldwide use to interact with the Internet. The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN . He was motivated by the problem of storing, updating, and finding documents and data files in that large and constantly changing organization, as well as distributing them to collaborators outside CERN. In his design, Berners-Lee dismissed
3721-507: Was a success at CERN, and began to spread to other scientific and academic institutions. Within the next two years, there were 50 websites created . CERN made the Web protocol and code available royalty free in 1993, enabling its widespread use. After the NCSA released the Mosaic web browser later that year, the Web's popularity grew rapidly as thousands of websites sprang up in less than
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