Your Hard Disk As Web Server?
If you enjoy working on the Web and spend most of your waking hours there, eventually, you'll end up with HTM or HTML files on your hard disk. You'll have them in your cache (discussed next), or you may save documents using the File, Save As command. Your browser provides a way to open these HTML files—generally a File, Open command or something similar. You'll see a typical Open box from which you can select the file you want to open.
Here's a geek trick for you. If you know the exact path to the file you want to open, and if you can type quickly, click in the Address or Location text box. Then, type the entire path and filename, such as C:/Program Files/Netscape/Navigator/ownweb.htm. This trick should work in both Netscape and Internet Explorer. In some browsers, however, you might need to use the more formal (and older) method by entering the file path in this format: file:///C|/Program Files/Netscape/Navigator/ownweb.htm. Notice that in the second format, you precede the path with file:/// and replace the colon after the disk letter (in this case, C) with a pipe symbol (|).
Forward Slash or Backslash
UNIX computers use a forward slash (/) between directory names. DOS computers use a backslash(\). Because the Web was developed on UNIX computers, URLs use forward slashes. Thus C:/Program Files/Netscape/Navigator/ownweb.htm is correct, even though in normal DOS notation this would appear as C:\Program Files\Netscape\Navigator\ownweb.htm. However, you can type it whichever way you please when you're opening a file on your hard disk or a page on the Web; both Internet Explorer and Netscape will figure it out.