 Virtual Library    Sport    Rowing

Announcement: Rowing and the World-Wide Web

Information on rowing is held as part of the World-Wide Web (WWW) global hypermedia Virtual Library under the following "URL" (Uniform Resource Locator):

http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/other/rowing.html

The WWW Virtual Library rowing page includes hyperlinks to other rowing information around the world, including regatta results, crews, etc. The "information superhighway" is likely to have an increasingly significant effect on the rowing community. This is especially so because many people involved with the sport are connected to universities which traditionally have good network connections.

For those interested in statistics, currently there are around 35 million people with Internet access and the number is doubling each year. WWW usage has been estimated to be increasing at 1% per day! The rowing page is accessed around 50-100 times a day (as of January 1995). The recent statistic are as follows for the main rowing page:

-------------------------------------
|       |  No of |          |       |
| Date  |requests|    Bytes |  File |
|-------+--------+----------+-------|
|  8/94 |    215 |  1816535 |  8449 |
|  9/94 |    784 |  6624016 |  8449 |
| 10/94 |   1156 | 12673228 | 10963 |
| 11/94 |   1839 | 36193359 | 19681 |
| 12/94 |   1690 | 25067770 | 14833 |
|  1/95 |   2508 | 49359948 | 19681 |
-------------------------------------

The dip in December may be due to the Christmas break - even rowers go home sometimes! Note that newer WWW client programs such as netscape allow convenient proxy cacheing of Web pages at a local site to save on network usage, so the actual number of accesses could be more than these figures suggest.

The WWW Virtual Library rowing page is mentioned in:

Bill Eager, Using the World Wide Web, QUE, 1994. Chapter 18, Sports, Games, Hobbies, Travel Cooking and Recreation, pp 534-5.

Information on other published articles mentioning the WWW Virtual Library rowing pages would also be of interest.

Jonathan Bowen, Oxford University Computing Laboratory.

Please email J.P.Bowen@reading.ac.uk if you know of relevant on-line information which could be added to this and the other rowing pages.

Appendix: Technical information

This page may be accessed on the global Internet "network of networks" by WWW client programs such as netscape or mosaic under X windows and lynx on ASCII terminals under Unix. Client programs are also available for use under MS-Windows on PCs and on Apple Macintosh computers. Access is also possible via a modem to an Internet site and such services are now available commercially.

WWW pages include underlined phrases which are hyperlinks to other URLs. These may be anywhere in the world on the Internet computer network, accessible via anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol), NNTP (USENET on-line newsgroups), Gopher (menu selection), WAIS (database), Telnet (remote interactive session), or WWW's own HTTP protocol, using HTML, based on the widely used SGML mark-up language. As well as HTML format, files may be in PostScript (formatted documents), GIF (color graphical images), XBM (monochrome images), JPEG (compressed color images, especially good for photographs), MPEG (moving color images), Sun audio (sounds), etc., and may be compressed using common utilities such as compress and gzip to save disk space. Different formats are handled by appropriate programs on the client machine.

Interaction is possible via "forms" pages in which menus, buttons and text boxes are presented to the user for selection and completion. Arbitrary programs may be run at the remote server site depending on the results of these interactions, thus enabling the possibility of remote interactive pages.