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Website Development & Hosting

a

a protocol

a

a machine name

a

a path/file name. (Occasionally, a port may be given as well.)

The  protocol  indicates  the  application  (telnet,  gopher,  ftp,  nntp,  http, etc.)  being  used  to

access the machine (site) and file. URLs that are not persistent undergo frequent changes. The file

you  accessed  yesterday  may  be  moved  today  and  removed  tomorrow.  This  has  a  tendency  to

frustrate  novice  users.  With  a  bit  more  experience  you  will  learn  to  track  down  files  that  have

moved and accept the complete removal of files as  just the way it is on the web .

Addresses  on  the  web  are  often  case,  space  and  symbol  sensitive.  You  should  always

enter them exactly.

Browsers

The browser governs what you can do within a particular site on the web. Many of the graphical

browsers have incorporated a variety of Windows  features such as the ability to select and save

portions of text, save files, print files and electronic mail. 

Browsers such as Netscape  and Internet Explorer  let the user set personal preferences. These

personal  preferences,  especially  those  relating  to  colour  and  font,  will  have  an  impact  on  the

appearance  of  your  document  on  the  user s  machine.  Conversely,  your  personal  preferences

should be set to standard when you are using your browser/computer to create web documents or

what you see may not be what anyone gets.

Occasionally, you may go to a website and see absolutely nothing, although your browser tells you

the document loading is complete. The creator may have placed colour and font settings in her

document that are incompatible with your personal preferences   similar to wearing blue in front

of a blue screen. In fact, the document is there and it may highlight and/or print normally.

Remember, the browser only interprets the code to the best of its ability. The closer that code is to

standard, the closer you will come to seeing the coded item in the way in which its creator intended.

Source Code

Web documents consist of displayed content and source code. The most common source codes

used to create web pages include hypertext markup language (html), XML, and Cold .usion.

Html is a formatting language. It allows the creator to code a document so that a displayed version

of the document will look somewhat like the original   for instance, so that bold type will stand

out. Other kinds of markup language, such as sgml, are meta-languages, which do much more

than simply format the documents. They may allow the content of a document or documents to

be manipulated in various ways, creating, for example, a table of contents, a nominal index, or a

collection  of  items  based  on  a  requested  set  of  criteria.  The  more  you  know  about  markup

language and how it works, the more efficiently and effectively you will be able to move through

the web and access needed materials.

Copyright  NESIS 2002

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