How to publish your QMS on your Intranet
	some basic concepts

chapter contents list

• the Internet
• the World Wide Web - WWW
• your local network - or intranet
• an introduction to hyperlinks
• browsers
• document types

the Internet

The Internet was one of the most important things to emerge from the 1990s. But what is it?

The Internet is a network of computers connected by "phone lines". It now consists of millions of computers. They communicate using a protocol called TCP/IP (transmission control protocol / Internet protocol). This enables programs on separate computers to communicate.

There are several different types of communication which run on TCP/IP. The commonest are e-mail and the World Wide Web. E-mail uses smtp (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), and the WWW uses http (HyperText Transfer Protocol). There are other protocols too. But we are primarily interested in http.

Everything (of interest) on the Internet has an address (which we won't go into). The combination of a protocol and an address is called a URL (Universal Resource Locator). The following are typical urls.

1. http://www.gkirk.com/papers/publishQMS/basic.htm
2. file:///C:/Data/GKL/WWW/PAPERS/publishQMS/basic.htm
3. mailto:gk@gkirk.com
4. doctypes.htm

The first is the url for this page on the WWW. It comprises several parts:

The second is the url for this page on my PC. This uses a protocol called "file" which is similar to http except that it is local to a PC. It comprises several parts:

The third is for the mailto protocol.

The fourth is a "relative url". That means that most of the url is missing. The file (doctypes.htm) is to be found in the same directory (or folder) as basic.htm itself. This can be very useful, as it means that when you write such a url you don't need to know where the file is - only where it is relative to the file in which you are writing the url - which you usually do.

The interesting thing about the above is the similarity between the http and the file protocols.

browsers

A "Web browser" is a program which you can run on your PC to access the WWW. You are doubtless familiar with many of the features of a typical browser (examples are: Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla, Opera). One of the key features is that the browser will fetch a page (using http) and paint it on your PC screen in an appropriate way. If the page it is painting makes reference to other files (for example, for graphics), the browser will fetch them (again using http) from wherever they are located and incorporate them into the painted screen.

Web browsers have a great many other functions too, not the least of which is providing a list of "bookmarks" or "favorites". These enable you to keep a list of the Web sites you use.

the World Wide Web - WWW

From the above, you can see that the WWW is a system that runs on the Internet. The WWW mainly uses http to access files. The WWW is usually accessed by using a Web browser.

an introduction to hyperlinks

Hyperlinking was a technique in use long before the WWW was invented, but without hyperlinks there would be no WWW.

The essential idea of a hyperlink is that behind an item on the screen is a url. If you click on the item (typically a piece of text), you will "go to" the new url. That is to say, your screen will be painted with the page which is pointed to by the url.

The hyperlinked items don't have to be text, they might be graphics (for example, buttons or icons).

your local network - or intranet

In most offices, labs, and workshops these days there are PCs which are connected by means of a local network (or intranet). You can use this intranet to set up your own mini-version of the WWW. All you need is a Web browser. Instead of having your Web pages on a Web server somewhere on the Internet, you simply put your "Web pages" on a file server on your intranet. You use the file: protocol instead of the http: protocol, and your Web browser does the rest. There are refinements beyond that, but that is the essence of the solution.

document types

A Web browser paints pages on your screen. To know what to paint, it uses the information from a computer file. Generally, that file will be coded using a language called html (HyperText Markup Language). This contains a mixture of normal text and special text. The normal text is the text you see painted on the screen. The special text is instructions to the Web browser about how to paint the text. Html files have a file extension of .htm or .html (either will do). When the Web browser is given an html file to process, it can tell from the file extension what sort of file to expect.

[The "file extension" is the dot and few characters at the end of the file name. If you have your file system viewer (eg: Windows Explorer) set not to display the file extensions, then you might wish to reset this option.]

A Web browser usually knows about more file types than only html. So, for example, if it is given a .pdf file, it will treat this as a PDF file (Portable Document Format). This is a format which is read and displayed by Adobe Acrobat Reader. In this case, the Web browser will call Adobe Acrobat to assist it, by painting the .pdf file in the browser window. For other file types (for example, .doc for MS Word documents) the Web browser might call Word to open the document in a window of its own. Precisely what happens for which file type depends on the browser and how you have your computer set up. But in general, we can say that a Web browser will open many more than just html files. This is good news, as it means that you can document your QMS in pretty much whatever document format you want, and your Web browser will handle it. The bad news is that not all these document types support hyperlinks as well as html does. There is a trade-off.