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What is "the web"? The short answer is simple: The web is a computer based information presentation system. Am I done now? Can I go home? Guess not. Although my description sums up the picture in a nutshell, there's so much more that people interpret as "the web." I tell my customers that "the web" is a cross between a newspaper, a magazine, a radio station, a television station and the grocery-store bulleting board. In many ways, the web is all things to all people, limited strictly by your imagination. There are web sites which bring you the newspaper and sites that bring you the movies. There are web sites that bring you audio live and in-progress, and there are a plethora of magazines and bulletin boards. The web can be used to buy, to sell, to barter. In fact, I can't think of many applications found in real life which aren't mimicked on "the web." Next, we're going to talk about the major mechanism which allows people to present information on "the web," Hyper Text Markup Language, usually referred to HTML in polite circles, and "HaTeMaiL to cynical professional web designers. HTML? What is HTML? HyperText Markup Language is the language of the World Wide Web. When you view a web-page in your browser, like Microsoft's Internet Explorer or AOL's Netscape Communicator, you're actually looking at a rather cryptic language which is interpreted by your browser. Your browser connects with the web server and requests the file you pointed at, referred to as the Uniform Resource Locator or URL (pronounced 'Earl' by the pros). If you look at the window at the top of this browser window, you should see the URL of this page: http://www.ndcrt.org/user_groups/internet/what_is_web.html Essentially, this 'pointer' tells your browser to connect, via the HTTP protocol, to the server known as www.ndcrt.org. On this end, the server says, "Hey! Here I am!" followed by a dialog which sends the coded page back to your browser. In this case, the physical page is named "what_is_web.html" So, you'd like to know what this HaTeMaiL stuff looks like, eh? Easy! For Internet Explorer users, go to your menubar titled View, then go to the item labeled Source. A fresh window will open with the code for this page inside. For Netscape users, go to your menubar titled View, then select the item labeled Page Source. Cool stuff, eh? This is a relatively simple page - just the way I like it. You should be able to identify a number of pieces of information from the page you normally see from the source code for the page. Look it over and study it. This is where the majority of our work is really done and HTML is about to become your friend. Our next stop will be a discussion of what I believe is quality page design. Of course, quality is a subjective experience so I always include a caveat at this point: One man's junk is another man's treasure. |
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All contents copyright 1996 - 2005 by Bob Nelson |
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