"The Mosaic Navigator", Gilster, 1995, 0-471-11336-0, U$16.95
Paul Gilster gilster@interpath.net
5353 Dundas Street West, 4th Floor, Etobicoke, ON M9B 6H8
1995
0-471-11336-0
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
U$16.95 416-236-4433 fax: 416-236-4448
243
"The Mosaic Navigator"
HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the standard for the
construction and use of documents which link to other items on the
net through the use of URLs (Universal Resource Locators). The
World Wide Web is the term which refers to the interconnected set of
documents which use HTTP. (World Wide Web is often abbreviated to
WWW, W3, or just Web, although this latter causes confusion with a
social issues information network by the same name.) Mosaic is an
HTTP or W3 client program, often referred to as a "browser". In
addition, the Mosaic browser has a graphical interface, and can
utilize "viewer" software to display graphics, sound, and video in
conjunction with HTTP "pages". There are other browsers, some, like
WWW and lynx, text-based. Other graphical clients include Netscape,
now being built by one of the original Mosaic developers, and a
proprietary part of the new "Warp" version of OS/2. Mosaic, itself,
exists in multiple freeware, shareware, and commercial versions, and
can be obtained for MS-Windows, the Macintosh, and X.
For those who have access to the Internet, but do not yet have
Mosaic or the necessary SLIP or PPP access, this book is an
excellent guide to getting set up. Chapters three and four give
quite detailed instructions for obtaining, installing, and
configuring the program. This includes an explanation of the
MOSAIC.INI file for Windows. Other resources include Mosaic and W3-
related newsgroups and mailing lists. Chapter six is also a solid
guide to the use of Mosaic to access ftp, telnet, Gopher, and Usenet
news resources.
Gilster's "The Internet Navigator" (cf. BKINTNAV.RVW) and "Finding
It On the Internet" (cf. BKFNDINT.RVW) are both excellent works, and
the weaknesses of this one are shortcomings only in light of that
comparison. The explanations of the World Wide Web, HTTP, and
Mosaic, while good, are not up to the previous standard. The
directions are not quite as lucid, and sometimes seem to assume more
knowledge on the part of the reader. Coverage of the actual
operation of Mosaic could be stronger: figures would have
benefitted from the use of pointers to items being selected, and the
discussion of Mosaic menu items is better in the O'Reilly &
Associates' Mosaic handbooks (cf. BKMOSAHX.RVW). Also, while Gilster
does discuss the fact that the capabilities of HTTP, W3, and Mosaic
may be misused for trivialities, that point is not made strongly
enough. He mentions the frustration involved with trying to use
Mosaic with a slow modem, but not the growing impact of massive
graphic, video, and sound file transfers on the bandwidth of the net
as a whole.