Class 1b

Introduction to Web Design

Class 1: Introduction  ƒ

ƒ

ƒ

ƒ

Web history o ARPANet, the first worldwide network was developed by the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA). ARPA was started in 1958 by Eisenhower and several MIT professors. ARPANet existed from from1969 to 1990, when the government private agencies like CERN access to the network technology. o The term Hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960’s. o One of Nelson’s contemporaries Tim Berners-Lee (of CERN) is credited as the father of the WWW. With help from Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee developed the first browser and expanded web protocols like FTP among other things. (1990-93) o By 1994 terms like email and HTML were household words. Now we have all sorts of hypermedia. The Internet, INTERconnected NETworks, is definitely here to stay. At this point, it can only grow. We, the users, determine how and where it does that. Horrible monstrosity or marvelous tool, we decide that. Basic Beginning Terminology o Server can refer to web server or data server that makes files available to web clients over the Internet. o Web client can refer to a web browser or other interface that brings the user in contact with data from a server. (Popular web browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Firefox, and Opera) o Protocol is a set of rules that govern how web communications happen. HTTP, which stands for hypertext transfer protocol, defines how web servers and browsers communicate. FTP, or file transfer protocol, sets the standards for how files are transferred. (The first well used one was TCP/IP which came out of ARPANet) o URL, or uniform resource locator, is the address of the resource (web site, file, etc) on the Internet. o HTML, hypertext markup language, is a system of coding pages for the World Wide Web (WWW). Coding web pages uses HTML tags. Tags are letters or abbreviations that appear in pointy brackets that surround the web content. Most tags must have an opening and a closing. Nowadays HTML coding obeys set standards but unfortunately this has not always been the case. There are still web pages on the Web that use outdated code that cases pages to no longer browse properly. In addition, HTML coding evolves faster that browsers are upgraded. This means that a page may look fine in one browser but ‘break’ in another. For practice with basic coding see the Resource List below.

Resource List History and Terminology of the Internet and World Wide Web ƒ ƒ

http:// livinginternet.com http:// internet101.com

Basic HTML Coding ƒ

http://www.w3schools.com

UNC‐G CALL Course # N26103  Notes prepared by Linda Hargrove September 25, 2006