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.