WEB

 A web is a set of documents with little or no actual overall structure; the anything typing each page together is a link (see figure 2.13). visitors drift from document to document,. Following the links around.

For an example of such a site, visit Wikipedia at http://wikipedia. Org. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia written and maintained by the public. Anyone can write a new article or edit an existing article, and the site is very loosely organized. Articles that reference topics discussed in other articles link to them, creating a web organization scheme. Wikipedia has no hierarchical organization; you’re expected to find

the topics you’re interested in by following links or using the search functionality.

Web structures tend to be free-floating and enable visitors to wander aimlessly through the content. Web structures are excellent for content that’s intended to be meandering or unrelated or when you want to encourage browsing. The world wide web itself is, of course, a giant web structure.

In the context of a website, the environment is organized so that each page is a specific location (and usually contains a description of that location). From that location,  you can move in several different directions, exploring the environment much in the way you  would move from room to room in a building in the real world (and getting lost just as easily). The initial home page, for example, might look something like the one shown in figure 2.14

From that page, you then can explore once of the links, for example, to go into the building, which takes you to the page shown in figure 2.15.

FIGURE 2.14 the home page for a web-based virtual environment.

FIGURE 2.15 another page in the web environment.

Each room has a set of links to each adjacent room in the environment. By following the links, you can explore the rooms in the environment.

The problem with web organizations is that you can get lost in them to easily-just as you might in the world you’re exploring in the example. Without any overall structure to the content, figuring out the relationship between where you are, where you’re going and, often, where you’ve been, us difficult. Context is difficult, and often the only way to find your way back out of a web structure is to retrace you steps. Web structures can be extremely disorienting and immensely frustrating if you have a specific goal in mind.

To solve the problem of disorientation, you can use clues on each page. Here are two ideas:

·         Provide a way out. Return to home page is an excellent link.

·         Include a map of the overall structure on each page, with a “you are here” indication somewhere in the map. It doesn’t ha we to be an actual visual map, but providing some sort of context goes along way toward preventing your visitors from getting lost.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO ON THE WEB?

 This question might seem silly. You wouldn’t have bought this book if you didn’t already have some idea of what you want to put online. But maybe you don’t really know what you want to put on the web, or you have a vague idea but nothing concrete. Maybe it has suddenly become your job to put a page for your company on the web, and someone handed you this book and said, “here, this will help”,. Maybe you just want to do something similar to some other web page you’ve seen and thought was particularly cool.

What you want to put on the web is what I’ll refer to throughout this book as your content. Content is a general term that can refer to text, graphics, media, interactive forms, and so on. If you tell someone what your web pages are about, you’re describing your content.

·         Stuff for work- perhaps you work in the accounting department and you need to publish the procedure for filing expense reports on your company’s intranet. Or you’re a software developer and you need to publish the test plan for your company’s next software release on an internal web server. Chances are that you can publish some information on a web page at work that will save you from having to type it into an email every time someone asks you about it. Try it!

·         Personal information- You can create pages describing everything anyone could every want to know account you and how incredibly marvelous you are _ your resume, your picture, things you’ve done.

·         Weblogs and journals – many people use the web to publish their journals or their opinions on a weblog. Many people use content management applications to publish their journals or weblogs, but knowing HTML is still helpful for changing the look and feel of your site and sprucing up your individual entries or articles.

·         Hobbies or special interests – a web page can contain information about a particular topic, hobby, or something you’re interested in; for example, music , star trek, upcoming jazz concerts in your city.

·         Publications – newspapers, magazines, and other publications lend themselves particularly well to the web, and websites have the advantage of being more immediate and easier to update than their print counterparts. Delivery is a lot simpler as well.

·         Company profiles _ you could offer information about what a company does, where it’s located, job openings data sheets, white papers, marketing collateral, product demonstrations, and whom to contact.

·         Online documentation – the term online documentation can refer to everything from quick – reference cards to full reference documentation to interactive tutorials or training modules. Anything task-oriented (changing the oil in your car, making a soufflé, creating landscape portraits in oil, learning HTML) could be described as online documentation.

·         Shopping catalogs – if your company offers items for sale, making your products available on the web is a quick and  easy way to let your customers know what you have available as well as your prices.  If prices change, you can just update your web documents to reflect that new information.

·         Online stores – it’s turned out that the web is a great place to sell things. There are any number of sites that let just about any body sell their stuff online. You can auction your goods off at eBay or sell them for a fixed price at half.com. Amazon. Com lets you do both. You can also create your own online store if you things online a lot easier than it used to be.

·         Polling and opinion gathering – forms on the web enable you to get feedback from your visitors via opinion polls. Suggestion boxes, comments on your web pages or your products, or through interactive discussion groups.

·         Online education – the low cost of information delivery to people anywhere with an internet connection via the web makes it an attractive medium for delivery of distance-learning programs. Already, numerous traditional universities, as well as new online schools and universities, have begun offering distance learning on the web. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of technology is placing teaching materials online for public used at http://ocw.mit.edu/.

·         Anything else that comes to mind – hypertext fiction, online toys, media archives, collaborative art…..anything!

The only thing that limits what you can publish on the web is your own imagination. In fact, if what you want to do with it isn’t in this list or seems especially wild or half-backed, that’s an excellent reason to try it. The most interesting web pages are the ones that stretch the boundaries of what the web is supposed to be capable of.

You might also find inspiration in looking at other websites similar to the one you have in mind. If you’re building a corporate site, look at the sites belonging to your competitors and see what they have to offer. If you’re working on a personal site, visit sites that you admire and see if you can if and inspiration of r building your own site. Decide what you like about those sites and you wish to emulate, and where you can improve upon those sites when you build your own.

If you really have no idea of what to put up on the web, don’t feel that you have to stop here; put this nook away, and come up with something before continuing. Maybe by reading through this book, you’ll get some ideas (and this book will be useful even if you don’t have ideas). I’ve personally found that the best way to come up with ideas is to spend as afternoon browsing on the web and exploring what other people have done.

SUMMARY

 To publish on the web, you  have to understand the basis concepts that make up the parts of the web. Today, you learned three major concepts. First, you learned about a few of the more useful features of the web for publishing information. Second, you learned about web browsers and servers and how they intract to deliver web pages. Third, you learned about what a URL is and why it’s Important to web browsing and publishing.

WORKSHOP

Each lesson in this book contains a workshop to help you review the topics you learned the first section of this workshop listed some common questions about the web. Next, you’ll answer some questions that I’ll ask you about the web. The answers to the quiz appear in the next section. At the end of each lesson, you’ll find some exercises that will help you retain the information you learned about the web.

QUESTION&ANSWER (Q&A)

Q  

who runs the web? Who controls all these protocols? Who’s in charge of all this?

A 

 No single entity owns or controls the world wide web. Given the enormous number of independent sites that supply information to the web, for any single organization to set rules or guidelines would be impossible. Two groups of organizations, however, have a great influence over the look and feel and direction of the web itself.

The first is the  world wide web consortium (w3c), based at Massachusetts institute of technology in the united states and INTRIA in Europe.  The w3c is made up of individuals and organizations interested in supporting and defining the languages and protocols that make up the web (HTTP, HTML, XHTML, and so on),. It also provides products(browsers, servers, and so on) that are freely available to anyone who wants to use them. The w3 consortium is the closest anyone gets to setting the standards for and enforcing rules about the world wide web. You can visit the consortium’s home page at http://www.w3.org/.

The second group of organizations that influences the web is the browser developers themselves, most no ability Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation. The competition to be the most popular and technically advanced browser on the web can be fierce. Although both organizations claim to support and adhere to the guidelines proposed by the w3C, both also include their own new features in new versions of their software_ features that sometimes conflict with each other and with the work the w3C is doing.

Things still change pretty rapidly on the web, although not as rapidly as they did in the height of the so-called browser wars. The popular browsers are finally converging to support many of the standards defined by the W3C, so writing to those standards will work most of the time. I’ll talk about the exceptions throughout this book.

Q  

 I’ve heard that the web changes so fast that it’s almost impossible to stay current. Is this  book doomed to be out of date the day it’s published?

A    

Although it’s  true that things do change on the web, the vast majority of the information in this book will serve you well far into the future. HTML and XHTML are as stable now as they have ever been, and once you learn the core technologies of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can add on other things at your leisure.

QUICK

1.       What’s a URL?

2.       What’s required to publish documents on the web?

QUIZ ANSWERS

1.       A URL , or uniform resource locator, is an address that points to a specific document or bit of information on the internet.

2.       You need access to a web server. Web servers, which are programs that serve up documents over the web, reply to web browser requests for files and send the requested pages to many different types of browsers. They also manage form input and handle database integration.

EXERCISES

1.       Try navigating to each of the different types of URLs mentioned today (http:, ftp:, and news:), some links you might want to try are http://www.tywepub.com, ftp://ftp.cdrom.com, and news:comp. infosystems.www.

2.       Download a different browser than the one you ordinarily use and try it out for a while. If you’re using internet explorer, try out Mozilla, nets cape, opera, or even a command-line browser such as lynx or links. To really see how things have changed and how some users who don’t upgrade their browser experience the web, download an old browser from http://browsers .evolt.org/ and try it out.

WEB SERVERS

 TO view and browse pages on the web, all you need is a web browser. To publish pages on the web, you need a web server.

A web server is the program that runs on a computer and is responsible for replying to web browser request for files. You need a web server to publish documents on the web. One point of confusion is that the computer on which a server program runs is also referred to as a server. So, when someone used the term web server, she could be referring to a program used to distribute web pages or the computer on which that program runs.

When you use a browser to request a page on a website, that browser makes a web connection to a server using the HTTP protocol. The server accepts the connection, sends the contents of the requested files, and then closes the connection, the browser then formats the information it got from the server.

On the server side, many different browses can connect to the same server to get the same information. The web server is responsible for handling all these requests.

Web servers do more than just serve files. They’re also responsible for managing form input and for liking forms and browsers with programs such as databases running on the server.

As with browsers, many different servers are available for many different platforms, each with many different features and ranging in cost form free to very expensive. For now, all you need to know is what the server is there for; you’ll learn more about web servers in lesson 18, “putting your site online”

UNIFORM RESOURCE LOCATORS

As you learned earlier, a URL is a pointer to some bit of data on the web, be it a web document, a file available via FTP,  a posting on use net, or an email address. The URL provides a universal, consistent method for finding and accessing information.

In addition to typing URLs directly into your browser to go to a particular page, you also use URLs when you create a hypertext link within a document to another document. So, any way you look at it, URLs are important to how you and your browser get around on the web.

URLs contain information about the following:

·         How to get to the information (which protocol to use: FTP, HTTP, or file)

·         The internet hostname of the computer where the content is stored (www.ncsa.uiuc.edu, ftp.apple.com, netrcom16.netcom.com, and so on)

·         The directory or other location on that site where the content is located

You also can use special URLs for tasks such as sending mail to people (called mailto URLs) and running java script code. You’ll learn all about RULs and what each part means in lesson5.

CAUTION

CAUTION

Most of your will access your site through your home page, but some will enter your site through other pages. The nature of the web is that people can link to any page on your site. If you have interesting information on a page other than your homepage, people will link directly to that page, on the other pages of your site, you shouldn’t assume that the visitor has seen your home page.

FIGURE 2.2 a home page .

 

A home page usually contains an overview of the content of the website, available from that starting point-for example, in the form of a table of contents or a set of icons. If your content is small enough, you might include everything on that single home page-making your home page and your website the same thing. A personal home page might include a link to a person’s resume and some pictures from a recent vacation. A corporate home page usually describes what the company does, and contains links like “about the company”, “products and services, and services”, and “customer support”.