And Now for the Bad News...

The first bad news--which you will figure out for yourself pretty quickly--is that the although the Web is high tech, it can also sometimes be painfully slow and unreliable.

This is partly a result of history: the technology underlying the Internet in general was never designed to be used on its current huge scale. It is also a result of the Web's explosive success. Every day the demands being made on the Internet are expanding rapidly--primarily as a result of increased Web-related traffic. The capacity of the Internet is expanding, but it is difficult for this expansion to keep up with demand, not least because there is no single central owner or manager of the Internet to co-ordinate this growth. Although the Internet was designed to be very robust, it achieves this robustness at a cost: whenever demand transiently exceeds capacity on some part of the Internet, that traffic begins to slow down. Sometimes it slows down a lot in the Internet equivalent of gridlock.

There is also a particular reliability problem introduced by the very rapid growth of the Internet. This affects the ability of the Internet to keep track of the relationship between the names of computers on the Internet and their underlying ``IP numbers''. The IP numbers are what actually control the routing of data through the network. Because so many new machines are being added, and so many requests are being generated for translations between names and numbers, the system for doing this translation (the Domain Name System or DNS) can get temporarily overloaded. This can give rise to very peculiar things. Suddenly you may be told that a site on the Web, which you had no difficulty accessing half an hour ago, now simply ``does not exist'' or ``cannot be found''.

Quite aside from the capacity limits of the core Internet network, individual server computers that make up the Web may become heavily overloaded. This can also manifest itself in severely slowed down communication, or in a temporary inability to access certain sites.

And all of this is quite aside from normal breakdowns and routine maintenance. In a network the size of the Internet, there are bound to be parts of it that are out of action for one reason or another, all the time.

The only point of this is to warn you to expect some significant degree of unreliability. During most Web sessions you will encounter at least some sites for which access is either impossible or unacceptably slow. This does not necessarily indicate that there is anything wrong with your computer, or your connection to the Internet--it is just currently a fact of digital life. Once you understand and allow for this, it need not detract too severely from your use and enjoyment of the Web.

The other bad news about the Web runs a little deeper, and may take rather longer to improve. I have already referred to it in passing: it is the problem of low quality content.

Remember first of all that most of the information resources currently offered on the World Wide Web are free of any special access charge. This is, once you have paid your ISP, and your phone bill, there is no further charge for accessing particular resources.

Now the publishers of information on the Web do not receive any payment from either the ISPs or the phone companies. So there is very limited immediate incentive and ability for publishers to invest in the production of high quality materials. This is very different from more traditional publishing media, such as books, newspapers, TV etc, where the (successful) publisher receives a direct payment from each consumer.

Perversely, this situation is made worse by the fact that the ``production'' cost of electronic publication (as opposed to authoring or development cost) is very small. As noted in the previous chapter, most ISPs actually offer a facility to host, or publish, a certain amount of information as part of their standard account. To put it crudely, cranks and crackpots can--for very moderate cost--use the Web as a medium to make their craziest ideas available to a global audience. Mind you, this is still subject to all normal publication laws in any particular jurisdiction, such as laws regulating publication of obscene or defamatory information, and laws relating to republication of copyrighted materials etc. Nonetheless, that still leaves a lot of space for crackpottery. Furthermore, legal systems vary greatly between different countries. Because of the global nature of the Internet there will be some materials which, though legal and even commonplace in their countries of publication, may be illegal, or at least seriously offensive, in various other countries where they can be accessed.

The nett result of all these factors is that the quality of Web information resources varies very widely indeed.

You should certainly not assume that, just because information is being relayed to you via this high-tech computerised system, it must therefore be true, or well-founded, or even grammatically expressed! Be prepared to come across an awful lot of chaff mixed in with a relatively modest amount of wheat. Perhaps even more than any previous publication medium, the Web requires the information users or consumers to exercise their own independent critical judgment. This means you!

Having said that, the situation is by no means all black. There are many situations where high quality information is available on the Web, despite the fact that there is no direct recompense for the publisher.

The most obvious incentive for providing high quality information is where this can be associated with promotion or advertising. Many companies are taking to making useful information resources or services freely available on the Web so as to entice you to visit their sites, and thus be also exposed to some advertising message. There are also independent content sites, funded by advertising, in the manner of online newspapers or magazines--an excellent Irish example is the Doras site at:

http://doras.tinet.ie

Then there are the many public service organisations which have a specific mission (or even obligation) to disseminate useful information to the widest possible audience. In this category we have organisations such as state departments and agencies, museums, universities and research institutions, charities, political parties, and so on. These organisations are increasingly seeing the Web as a powerful new way of extending the reach of their publications, at very little additional cost.

Finally, there are many, many groups and individuals who publish high quality, useful, information resources simply because they are interested in it, enjoy doing it, appreciate the global contacts it introduces them to--and not at all for any monetary reward to themselves. In this category we have clubs, societies, hobby groups and a wealth of others.

It also cannot be emphasised too much that the Web is expanding and developing at an extraordinary rate. The generalisations made here about the quality of the information available on the Web will be at least somewhat out of date before this book is even printed. We'll return to look at some of the newest developments in Internet technology (as well as some of the oldest!) in chapter 6--especially that most talked about buzzword of e-commerce. But first, it's time to step back to something simpler and more mundane. That is the modern rebirth of the old fashioned letter, in the new guise of electronic mail or e-mail.