The atom of the Web is a single document called a web page, which is a text document written in a special format called HTML. Groups of web pages stored under the same Internet domain are referred to as a Web site. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a combination of plain text and specially formatted instructions that indicate how the text should appear.
The term "markup" refers to those special instructions. Just as a typesetter or layout editor may indicate with a red pen how a plain block of text is to be formatted on a page, HTML indicates how a web page is formatted on the screen when viewed through a program called a Web browser, or just browser.
The term World Wide Web, or Web for short, refers to a unique global entity and should properly be capitalized. Not every web page is on the Web, though. You could store a copy on your own hard drive for safekeeping, for example, and some companies create groups of web pages for their LAN (company policies, for example), not for publishing on the Internet.
In short, when referring to an HTML document that may or may not be available on the Internet, "web" is fine, but when referring to the World Wide Web itself or anything on it, "Web" is better. An HTML document is "marked up" using special instructions called tags, which are distinguished in the document using the keyboard symbols and which, in this context, are called "angle brackets." Here's a simple example marked up in HTML:
I <b>must </b>have doughnuts, <i>right now!</i>
When displayed, this text would appear as:
I must have doughnuts, right now!
In the HTML, the <b> tag indicates "start displaying the text in boldface," and the </b> indicates "stop displaying the text in boldface." Similarly, the <i>and </i> indicate where to start and stop the display of text in italics. HTML tags can be divided into four categories.
Character formatting tags change the appearance of the text itself. The <b> and <i> tags in the example are character formatting tags. This category includes most of the same options that would appear on the "Font" menu of a typical word processor, including font face, font size, bold and italics, and so on.
Choosing a font, though, is a more complicated decision than with a word processor. When you use a word processor, it only allows you to pick a font that is actually installed on your computer. When designing a web page, a designer cannot know for sure what fonts are installed on all the computers that will view it. If a page designates the use of a font that is not on the computer, the browser picks the font it thinks is the closest match or falls back to a default font. The text is always seen, but it may appear very differently than what the designer intended. Because of these unknowns, designers tend to stick to a few common fonts.
Layout tags determine how the text flows across the page. These tags say where one paragraph ends and the next begins, and are used to divide the page into different parts; for example, to make multicolumn layouts. Web designers have some of the same issues with layout as they do with fonts. Users may freely resize their browser window, and, if the window is dramatically narrower or wider than the designer expects, the layout could turn out badly.
Links are what make hypertext. HTML can make two kinds of references to material outside the document. One kind is a link to another web page or a different place on the same page, which is called an anchor tag. Anchors can be used to make a link to another page or to make a place where other pages can link or do both.
Apage summarizing the history of the Olympic Games might have a paragraph for each Olympics with an anchor tag for each, so that another page could have a link directly to, say, the 1980 Olympics. Furthermore, that same page might have a series of links at the top so users could jump directly to the part of the history they're interested in. Without any anchors, other pages can only link to the page itself, which means the top of the page.
Another type of link is to other media, like images. Beyond using photographs and other graphics to better convey the material, web page designers use images to enhance layout and make up for other shortcomings. If a designer wants to use an unusual font for a title at the top of a page, knowing it's unlikely that the font will be available on most users' computers, the designer can create an image of that text in the chosen font. Because images require more bytes to store than an equivalent amount of text, though, such techniques must be used sparingly.
Designers can also embed other media, such as sounds or video. Finally, the page may link to other documents for which HTML is not an appropriate format. The IRS, for example, makes all the U.S. tax forms and instructions available on its site, but doesn't store them in HTML. Instead, it uses the portable document format (PDF), which was developed by the Adobe Corporation to provide document designers with the kind of control unavailable in HTML.
It avoids the font problem by allowing the document designer to include the font data in the document. This makes the file much larger, but means it's not important what fonts are installed on the user's computer. It avoids the layout problems as well, allowing the document to be scaled to fit the user's window or zoomed into at the user's request. PDF is an excellent choice for standardized forms, which may be printed by the user, such as the ones the IRS provides.
Other tags exist for items that don't affect the page itself. For example, the web page can specify what is displayed in the browser's title bar. Other tags, called meta tags, don't have anything to do with the display, but provide information about the page's content. This information can be useful for indexing the pages and may also aid browsers in displaying the page properly.
Creating web pages is complicated work. It combines the skills of a graphics designer with those of a programmer. Early HTML documents were created using a text editor; the designer had to actually type in all those tags. This approach is troublesome for large pages because in text form an HTML document looks very different than when it is viewed in a browser. If you want to see how different, most browsers have an option - in Internet Explorer it's under the "View" menu - to view the "source" of the page, which is the HTML document in text form. Do this for any large page on the Web and you'll quickly see the difficulty.
Thankfully, tools now allow direct editing of HTML. These programs work like a page layout program or advanced word processor. The designer just drags the text to where it needs to be, sets the font sizes and faces, drops in the images, and so on, and the editor creates the HTML without the designer even having to see it.
Also helpful to designers is the addition of stylesheets to HTML. A stylesheet is a document that an HTML document can reference to determine how its text is displayed. For example, a web page for a news organization could have a stylesheet that defines a "headline" as a 20-point, bold, Times New Roman font; a "byline" as a 12-point Arial font, italicized; and a "story body" as a regular 12-point Arial font. Then a web page with a news story indicates that it is using that stylesheet, declares that "Costumed Crusader Saves City" is the headline, "Jimmy Dugan, Cub Reporter" is the byline, and the rest of the page is the story body. The browser then formats the text according to the stylesheet.
If a Web site has only one page, a stylesheet doesn't save any time. But when a site has dozens or hundreds of pages with similar elements, a stylesheet allows the text formatting to be designated in one place instead of over and over in each page. If the designer later decides that 20-point headlines are too big, or not big enough, the only document that needs to be changed is the stylesheet. Without it, every page on the site would have to be changed.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Webworldarticles.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
This article was sent to us by:
Kellan P. Bailey at
02132011
1. Become aware of Internet browsers and use the web in a creative way
All articles in this directory are property of their respective authors. Additionally, read our Privacy Policy
© 2010 WebWorldarticles.com - All Rights Reserved. Partners: Gunblade Saga