Understanding
The World Wide Web
The Internet is a collection of
computers around the world connected to each other via a high-speed series of
networks. The World Wide Web or Web consists of a vast assortment of
files and documents that are stored on these computers and written in some form
of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
that tells browsers how to display the information. The computers that
store the files are called servers because
they can serve requests from many users at the same time. Users access these
HTML files and documents via applications called browsers.
The Language of the Web: HTML
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the
authoring language that describes how a Web page should be displayed by a Web
browser. It has two essential features: hypertext and universality. Hypertext
means when a visitor clicks a link on a Web page, the visitor is led to another
Web page or document. Universality means that because HTML documents are saved
as text files, virtually any computer can read a Web page.1 For increased
accessibility to your Web pages, we recommend using XHTML (Extensible Hypertext
Markup Language) when creating your Web pages.
Web Browsers
A Web browser is a program that displays
Web pages and other documents on the Web. Unfortunately, different browsers may
interpret the HTML of Web pages somewhat differently, and thus, when you create
Web pages remember that they may appear different when viewed in various
browsers. The University supports the browsers illustrated below, which can be
downloaded free from the company’s Web site.
Internet
Explorer Web browser
Maxthon web browser
Note: A visitor can customize many display
features of a browser, including:
·
Background color
·
Font
·
Font size
·
Text and link colors, and
·
Whether or not to download images.
The
Structuring Content
When a Web page is opened in a
browser, the browser reads and interprets the HTML file and formats the Web
page for display. If there are references to external files, such as images or
multimedia, these files are downloaded from the server and displayed in the
browser window. It is important to note that HTML files are text files that
only contain references to the external files – you do not “embed” these files
into the Web page
2.1 File naming Extension (File type)
A filename
extension is a suffix to the name of a computer file applied to indicate the
encoding convention or file format of its contents. The following tables show
examples of some common filename extensions.
Filename
extension of Textual Files
|
TEXT
|
||
|
FILE TYPE
|
CONTENT
|
APPLICATION
|
|
.html
|
Hypertext
Mark-Up Language, the code of simple Web pages. Usually plain texts file with
embedded formatting instructions.
|
Internet
browser such as Internet Explorer, Crazy Browser, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.
|
|
.pdf
|
Portable
Document Format, a document presentation format, downloads as binary.
|
Adobe
Acrobat
|
Filename
extension of Image Files
|
IMAGES
|
||
|
FILE
TYPE
|
CONTENT
|
APPLICATION
|
|
.gif
|
General Interchange
Format,
|
Window viewer and many others.
|
|
.jpg
.jpeg
|
Joint Picture Experts
Group,
|
Window viewer and many others.
|
Filename
extension of Sound Files
|
SOUND
|
||
|
FILE
TYPE
|
CONTENT
|
APPLICATION
|
|
.mp3
|
Audio Files on both PC and Mac
|
Windows Media Player, KMP Media Player. Etcetera .
|
|
.wav
|
Audio files on PC
|
Real Player
|
2.2 Text
Editors
There are series of text editors
to write html codes and other web development language. Examples are: Notepad,
Notepad++, Aptana studio, and MIicrosoft visual studio 2012, Adobe Dreamweaver
etc. In this tutorial we will be using Notepad to write the code.
2.3 Html tags and functions
HTML
consists of standardized “tags” that are used to define the structure of
information on the Web pages. The decision about the structure of the text is
made by the browser based on the tags, which are marks that are embedded into
the text. A tag is enclosed in two signs (< and >) and usually comes in
pairs. The beginning tag starts with the name of the tag, and the ending tag
starts with a slash followed by the name of the tag. The use of tags enables
web pages to have many features including bold text, italic text, heading,
paragraph breaks and numbered or bulleted list.
<html>-This
is the main container for HTML pages
<head>-This is the container for page header information
<title>-The is used for the title of the page
<body>-This is a container of the main body of the page
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