Web Design and Development

1. Web Design and Development Unit 1: Navigating the World Wide Web

2. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Introduction • Over the past decade, the Web has become a fabric of society (nearly everybody knows how to use it!). • Most businesses and organizations have websites (nearly everybody has a URL). • But you don’t have to be a big company to publish things on the Web. • You only need a computer and access to the Internet. • AND... the knowledge to create a website.

3. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Introduction • The language of website creation is know as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). • The Web is currently transitioning from HTML 4/XHTML 1 standards to HTML 5. • We will be focusing on the HTML 5standard, while at the same time referring to the previous standards for relational understanding.

4. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Web Design Class Class Tools: • Firefox Browser with Add-Ons • HTML Validator • Web Developer • FireFTP • EditPlus3 (text editor) • /w html5_kit preferences

5. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • How the World Wide Web Works: • An understanding of the Web at a more theoretical level allows you to understand how it works as a platform. • The World Wide Web can be described as a ... • Global • Interactive • Dynamic • Cross-platform • Distributed • Graphical • Hypertext information system • ... that runs over the Internet.

6. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is a Hypertext Information System • Instead of reading text in a rigid, linear structure (such as a book), you can skip easily from one point to another. • Hypertextenables you to read and navigate text and visual information in a nonlinear way, based on what you want to know next. • When you hear the term hypertext, think links.

7. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Graphical and Easy to Navigate • In the early days, using the Internet involved simple text-only applications. • Mosaic: The first graphical web browser able to display both text and graphics in full color on the same page.

8. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Graphical and Easy to Navigate • A browser is used to view and navigate web pages. Currently, the most popular browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. • More and more people are using mobile devices to access the Web, most of which have their own browsers.

9. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Cross-Platform • The World Wide Web isn’t limited to any one kind of machine or developed by any one company. • Cross-platform means that you can access web information equally well from any computer hardware running any operating system using any display. • With the introduction over the years of numerous technologies, the Web has lost some of its capability to be truly cross-platform (i.e. users of Flash and/or “plug-ins”).

10. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Distributed • Web content can take up a great deal of space, particularly when you include images, audio, and video. • The Web succeeds at providing so much information because that information is distributed globally across millions of websites. • These sites reside on one or more computers, referred to as web servers. • A web server is just a computer that listens for requests from web browsers and responds to that request.

11. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Distributed • A website is a location on the Web that publishes some kind of information. • Each website, and each page or bit of information on that site, has a unique address. This address is called a uniform resource locator or URL. • Whenever you use a browser to visit a website, you get there using a URL (often by using a domain name).

12. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Dynamic • Web content can change at any time. • If you want a permanent copy of some information stored on the Web, you’ll need to save it at that time. • Web publishing gives you the ability to keep your information up-to-date all the time. • You don’t have to spend a lot of time re-releasing updated documents. There’s no cost of materials.

13. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • The Web Is Interactive • Interactivity is the capability to “talk back” to the web server. • The act of selecting a link and jumping to another web page to go somewhere else on the Web is a form of interactivity. • The Web also enables you to communicate with the publisher of the pages you’re reading and with other readers of those pages. • 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.

14. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Web Browsers • A web browser is an application you use to view pages and navigate the World Wide Web. • A wide array of Web browsers are available for just about every platform you can imagine. • If you don’t take all the popular browsers into account when creating your Web pages, you’ll limit your audience substantially.

15. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Web Browsers • The core purpose of a web browser is to connect to web servers, request documents, and then properly format and display those documents. • Each web page is a file written in a language called the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that includes the text of the page, a description of its structure, and links to other documents, images, or other media. • Different browsers might format and display the same file in diverse ways, depending on the capabilities of that system and how the browser is configured.

16. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • An Overview of Some Popular Browsers • Microsoft Internet Explorer, is included with Microsoft Windows. Because Windows has the largest market share, Internet Explorer is the most popular web browser in the U.S. • Mozilla Firefox is a free, open source web browser that enjoys a large share of the browser market. Firefox has become popular in large part because it is free from the security issues that plague Internet Explorer, a large number of Firefox extensions improve the browser experience, and Firefox has done a good job of keeping up with web standards as they have evolved.

17. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • An Overview of Some Popular Browsers • Apple Safari is the default browser for Apple’s OS X. There is also a version that’s available for Windows, and a mobile version of this browser is installed on the Apple iPhone. • Google Chrome, the newest browser, is known for offering very high performance and has some features that prevent it from crashing as often as other browsers.

18. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Other Browsers • Opera • Konqueror • Camino • Lynx • Links

19. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Using the Browser to Access Other Services • Although the Web is its own information system with its own Internet protocol (the Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP), web browsers can also read files from other Internet services. • To point your browser to different kinds of information on the Internet, you use different kinds of URLs. • Other protocols: • FTP, Gopher,Telnet

20. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Web Servers • 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 requests for files. • When you use a browser to request a page on a website, that browser makes a web connection to a server using HTTP. • 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.

21. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Web Servers • Web servers are also responsible for managing form input and for linking forms and browsers with programs such as databases running on the server. • These days, a lot of people make websites without uploading pages to a web server. They publish blogs using any of a number of popular services, or they use a content management system of some kind, or they publish pages on a wiki. • Regardless of the application you use to publish information on the Web, it is likely to be published as HTML.

22. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Uniform Resource Locators • A URLis a pointer to some bit of data on the Web. You use URLs when you create a hypertext link within a document. • URLs contain information about the following: • How to get to the information (which protocol to use: FTP, HTTP, etc.) • The Internet hostname of the computer where the content is stored (www.unr.edu, ftp.apple.com, and so on). • The directory or other location on that site where the content is located (http://www.washoe.k12.nv.us/galena). • You also can use special URLs for tasks such as sending mail to people (called Mailto URLs) and running JavaScript code.

23. NAVIGATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB • Summary • To publish on the Web, you have to understand the basic concepts that make up the parts of the Web. • Three major concepts: • Be aware of the useful features of the Web for publishing information. • Know about web browsers and servers and how they interact to deliver web pages. • Know what a URL is and why it’s important to web browsing and publishing.