Session 3: the net and the web

INM348 - Digital Information Technologies and Architectures
 
In this session we looked at the Internet and the World Wide Web, and some of the protocols and processes that underpin them.

We have set up a series of student web pages as examples for this session - you can see mine here [URL: http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abhd820/index.html]. My pages use HTML tags to mark up my information for presentation via browsers; they also hyperlink to pages held in different places across the Web. We created the pages on local computers; to make these pages accessible via the Web we had to publish them (via telnet or another file transfer programme) on an external web server hosted by City University.

The Internet was developed by the US military as a decentralised communications network that could continue operating if several nodes were destroyed. Although the Internet gives us the infrastructure it was  Berners-Lee's [URL: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/] vision of  'an abstract document space [which] could contain every single item of information accessible over networks' (Berners-Lee, 1999) that made today's World Wide Web a reality. The Web is software that runs over the internet to enable connections between different computers, using common protocols to exchange data.

HTML is a structured approach to publishing web pages. You 'tag' pieces of text or data using standard markers - for headings, paragraphs and so on - and other computers can interpret the tags and thus present the text (or data, or whatever) consistently.

<h1>So this heading tag....</h1>

...shows up as a heading

Fig 2. Interpreted tags. 

And hyperlink tags enable users to jump to different pages [URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink] regardless of where the physical pages are held.

It's generally best to use HTML to structure your web content. Although there are tags to govern the design of the pages, this can make your pages unwieldly, using techology such as style sheets can be a more elegant solution. We'll look at style sheets on web pages in Session 6.

Word count for this entry, excluding figures and captions: 299 words.

Session 2: data and HTML

INM348 - Digital Information Technologies and Architectures

Binary - counting in base two - underpins all of computing. Data exchanged by computers is expressed in binary, which is expressed as a string of zeros and ones. So, for example, the number 56 is 0011010100110110.

We create formats to enable computers to present this data to us as words, numbers and pictures. For example, ASCII (the American Standard Codes for Information Interchange) is a format to translate 7 bit binary codes into words and numbers.

There are other ways to encode binary data to provide us to do more, such a structuring documents with headings and paragraphs, and so on. We can encode this data about the document and its content - the metadata - into the document, to make it more intelligible. And we can use a system of marking the document up, using tagging, to help our computer software present the document in the way we want it. HTML - the markup language used to structure and present documents on the world wide web - uses tags in angle brackets to denote headings and paragraphs, like this:

<h1>Here's an example of a heading tag</h1>

<p>Here's a paragraph tag.</p>

Fig 1. Examples of tags.

This is all pretty fundamental - after all, binary data is arguably essentially meaningless unless it is formatted and interpreted in some way so it can be converted into information and knowledge.

In this session, we also looked at the differences between a file-centred and document-centred view of managing data. Networked environments enable us to adopt a the latter view, in which a document can comprise of a disparate set of files – graphics, text, video and so on – which are stored in diverse locations, and linked with special tags. This enables us to make our web pages more interesting, but also manage them more efficiently; so rather than embedding large files, we simply link to them.

Word count for this entry, excluding figures and captions: 297 words.

Session 1: blogs and web 2.0

INM348 - Digital Information Technologies and Architectures
 
Our first session on the Digital Information Technologies and Architectures (DITA) module deals specifically with blogs, and touches on the concept of 'Web 2.0'. Blogs are arguably one of the most visible manifestations of this phenomena, even though it's been a full ten years since Blogger, one of the most popular blogging tools, was launched.
[URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8286174.stm]

This blog will be my coursework for this module. It’s organised as a series of blog posts, one per session; the posts will usually consist of a short review of the key points of our lecture, backed up with some examples. In addition I have tagged each session’s entry using the blogging tool’s labelling function; the tag I have used is ‘DITA’.

Before starting the blog, I also reviewed some of the leading blogging tools. I took a look at Blogger [URL: http://www.blogger.com/] , WordPress [URL: http://wordpress.org/] and Livejournal [URL: http://www.livejournal.com/], and, although there were some differences in ease of use and functionality offered, they all allowed me to start creating blogposts within minutes. I chose Blogger as it offered the service that, to me anyway, was the easiest to set up and manage. In addition, the functionality offered by most blogging services, that enables me to log in and edit or publish posts from any computer is extremely useful.

Blogging has proved a very flexible and useful tool for creating and managing my coursework on this module. It’s very well-suited to small digestible chunks of information like my session posts – it also allows me to hyperlink out to other information, such as my personal web space, and upload images and screenshots where necessary.

Finally, being able to rework entries after publishing them, has been very useful, as I’ve found it very useful to return to posts - sometimes several times - as I’ve learned more during this module.

Word count for this entry, : 297 words.