Lecture notes

250.02 -
Web Design

World Wide Web

The Internet
Universality
HTML

HTML & Info Path

Web authoring
Servers
Modems
Browsers
URLs

Creating a site

Organizing Files
Design Issues
Dynamic HTML
Plugins

Managing a site

UBArt server (LAN)
UB UNIX (FTP)

What is the World Wide Web?

The Internet is a loosely configured network of multitudes of connected computers, each assigned a unique address. The World Wide Web (WWW), the most widely used component of the Internet, delivers information from sites in the form of Web pages. Other components include email, newsgroups, file transfer (FTP), and Telnet.

The Internet began as ARPANET by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and fell under the control of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). This ultra-safe communication system was made up of large mainframe computers connected over long distances using phone lines. In the event of war, if a message was sent from Washington to San Diego and a computer in Chicago was bombed, the message might travel through Kansas City, Houston, or any number of other DOD sites. There was no way the message could get lost because the system would always have backup options to aid delivery.

In the 1980s scientists and educational institutions began to see the benefits of such an integrated communications system and began adding to and improving the DOD’s Internet systems. These new Internet developers envisioned a global network for the free transfer of knowledge, correspondence, and intellectual discussion.

In the beginning the Net was basically a text based entity, but this began to change after Apple Computer popularized the graphic user interface. Users began to demand graphics and design on web pages along with the plain text. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as a way of displaying graphic interfaces on the Internet, thus giving birth to the World Wide Web.

Today the Internet grows increasingly commercial and is expanding at a staggering rate. Most major corporations, educational institutions, and cities have sites on the Web. Millions of individuals and small companies have home-pages which provide sometimes useful, sometimes inane information. Users can search for information, do banking, buy and sell products, keep in touch with friends and relatives, play games, entertain and sometimes inform themselves.

Universality The Internet was designed as a universal system for the exchange of ideas and information across international computer systems. This is a big goal and it often causes problems. Computer systems and capabilities range from super computers (such as the Macintosh G4) to low-end PC systems running Windows 3.1 (which is still in wide use throughout the world). Windows NT workstations can have hundreds of MBs of RAM while an old Macintosh LCIII might only have 4 MBs of RAM. Universal Web languages have been developed to bridge as many gaps between computer capabilities as possible so that all computers can communicate on some consistent level. The most popular of these languages is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) Hypertext is a system which links documents together using hyperlinks. Links allow a word or image in one document to be clicked on to cause another document to appear. HTML is a language of coding tags which are used to markup Hypertext documents so that they can be read and displayed (rendered) by browser applications. Some tags tell the viewer's browser how to display type, such as bold <b>this is bold text</b> and others tell the browser to jump to another page, like <a href="http://www.art.buffalo.edu">UBart</a>.

Besides transmitting textual data, HTML also supports the display of several graphics formats, including GIFs, JPEGs, PNGs, SWFs, and QuickTime movies, among others. These formats contain file compression algorithms to minimize the time it takes the viewer to download and display the files.

Because HTML does such a great job of bridging technology gaps it must sometimes do a poor job of translating designer’s aesthetic ideas. HTML is a clunky, backwards, difficult language. It’s code provides only the most rudimentary formatting options to the graphic designer. HTML is often interpreted differently by different computers and even by different browsers on the same computer. HTML is difficult and finicky, but it is the best and most widely accepted system of universal digital information transfer currently available.

HTML is a rapidly evolving language with new tags being added yearly and with plug-ins (which support special file formats like movies, animation or sounds) being added frequently. Because of this rapid development there are sometimes problems with certain tags being misinterpreted by some computers or browsers. The universal standard HTML reference is maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Many designers stick to basic tags to combat anomalies, but without designers taking chances on new tags and new ideas the Web as we know it would never have come into being.