THE WEB IS INTERACTIVE

THE WEB IS INTERACTIVE

yahoo news, live game update websites fig 1.2,1.3

Interactivity is the capability to “talk back” to the web server. More traditional media, such as television, isn’t interactive in the slightest; all you do is sit and watch as shows are played at you. Other than changing the channel, you don’t have much control over what you see. The web is inherently interactive; the act of ;selecting a link and jumping to another web page to go somewhere else on the web is a form of interactively. In addition to this simple interactivity, however, the web also enables you to communicate with the publisher of the pages you’re reading and with other readers of those pages.

For example, pages can be designed to contain interactive forms that readers can fill out. Forms can contain text-entry areas, radio buttons, or simple menus of items,. When the form is submitted, the information typed boy readers is sent back to the server from which the pages originated. Figure  1.3 shows an example of an online form for a rather ridiculous census.

FIGURE 1.2  Yahoo! News.

FIGURE1.3  The surrealist census form.

As a publisher of information on the web, you can use forms for many different purposes, such as the following:

·         To get feedback about your pages.

·         To get information from you readers (survey, voting, demographic, or any other kind of dada). You then can collect statistics on that data, store it in a database, or do anything you want with it.

·         To provide online order forms for products or service available on the web.

·         To create guest books and conferencing systems that enable your readers to post their own information on your pages. These kinds of systems enable your readers to communicate not only with you, but also with other readers of your pages.

WEB BROWSERS

A web browser, as mentioned earlier, is the program you use to view pages and navigate the world wide web. A wide array of web browsers is available for just about every platform you can imagine. Most browsers are freeware or shareware or shareware (try before you buy) or windows and safari is included with Mac OS X. Mozilla firefox, Netscape navigator, and Opera are all available for free. Currently, the most widely used is Microsoft internet explorer (sometimes called just internet explorer or IE). Despite the fact that internet explorer has the lion’s share of the market, however, it isn’t the only browser on the web. This point will become important later, when you learn how to design web pages and learn about the diverse capabilities of different browsers. Assuming that internet explorer is the only browser in use on the web and designing your pages accordingly limits the audience you an reach with the information you want to present.

NOTE

Choosing to develop for a specific browser, such as internet explorer, is suitable when you know a limited audience using the targeted browser software will view your website. Developing this way is a common practice in corporations implementing intranets. In these situations, it’s a fair assumption that all users in the organization will use the browser supplied to them  and, accordingly, it’s possible to design the web pages on an intranet to use the specific capabilities of the browser in question.