ITSE 1411 Beginning Web
HTML Chapter 1 Discussion

Discussion
- The Internet and the WWW
- The Internet was originally used for national security and for research institutes. However, use of the Internet was cryptic and was text only. The commercialization of the Internet spurred the development of the World Wide Web, which uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to communicate between personal computers (the client) and a web server.
- This course introduces you to "client-side" programming using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to display a web page, JavaScript to program a page, and Cascading Style Sheets CSS to format a page.
- The WWW is a graphical interface to the Internet.
- The World Wide Web Consortium makes recommendations for technologies related to the web. No software company is required to follow these recommendations. However, for this course, I require W3C standards because I believe your pages will be more cross browser and cross device compatible when following these standards.
- The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)" is a major area of the W3C for setting accessibility standards. These standards help overcome visual, auditory, physical, and neurological disabilities.
- The American with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements apply to the web. These requirements increase the usability of the website.
- Graphics, design, and text on a website is considered to be copyrighted. The websites you create for this course will be password protected on an edu site. The images provided in the text are allowable for use in an educational environment.
- Web Browsers and Web Servers
- The computer you are working on is called a client workstation. The client is part of a client-server architecture. The term client/server refers to computers joined by a network. Typically, a client is an application that runs on a personal computer or workstation and relies on a server to perform some operations. For example, an e-mail client is an application that enables you to send and receive e-mail.
- A switch is a small hardware device that joins multiple computers together within one local area network (LAN).
- When working at an ACC computer lab, your workstation is part of a network that connects to a switch that either connects to the campus server or to a router. At home, you may or may not be part of a network (LAN). To reach the Internet, your desktop is connected to a router (and possibly a switch to direct you to the router).
- The Internet uses client/server architecture. The "client" is the computer you are using to connect to the Internet. The software used to request information is called a browser. The most popular browsers today are Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Safari. The "server" typically runs software such as Apache or Microsoft Internet Information Server. At ACC we run Apache on a Linux server.
- To exchange data, the type of file transferred must be described in order to be interpreted. This is done with Multi-Purpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) and no longer refers to just Internet email. MIME now refers to audio, video, image, application, message, multipart, and text.
- Internet Protocols
- Protocols are the rules that describe the communication between client and server. Some protocols are:
- E-Mail requires both an incoming and outgoing mail server. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is use for outgoing mail. Post Office Protocol (POP or POP3) and Internet Message Access Protocol IMAP) can be used for receiving e-mail.
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol called HTTP is used to send and receive a request to a website. You will have a website for the class and will access it through a browser using an HTTP request.
- File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is used to move files from one computer to another. In our class we will use Secure Shell (SSH) for file transfer. This helps protect our server from hackers.
- File Transfer Protocol (TCP/IP) is used as to communicate over the Internet. The files are broken into units called packets using TCP and the files are sent using IP addressing to find the current best path to take.
- Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol
- IP Addresses correspond to a domain name that accesses each device connected to the Internet. The most recent version of Internet Protocol is expanded from 32 bits to 128 bits to allow more addressing. These updates will occur independently by service providers.
- Uniform Resource Identifiers and Domain Names
- A URI is an identifier that identifies a resource on the Internet. A URL is the type of URI. This pre-assignment is found by the HTTP Protocol, on the ACC web server (the Domain name), in the account assigned to me (folder name), and then I have further subdivided my account into more folders for organization.
- HTML Overview
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is a set of codes (called tags) that are used to describe how display occurs on the web.
- Each code is referred to as an element or tag. And each tag has a purpose. Tags are enclosed in angle brackets, "<" and ">".
- The predominant markup language for web pages.
- Defines the structure and rules for the page, such as paragraphs, bullets, line breaks, headings, etc.
- Used to embed text, multimedia, hyperlink, and scripts.
- Some tags are used as a pair, to open and close the element. Some tags are used as a stand-alone.
- XHTML, eXtensible HyperText Markup Language
- A partial merge of XML and HTML standards.
- Written for internationalization, accessibility, device-independence, usability and document structuring.
- Elements must be properly nested, always closed, lowercase, and nested within the <html> root element.
- More often renders on hand held devices.
- Renders faster than HTML.
- The greatest challenge of writing XHTML code is writing "valid" code. This means that your code follows all the syntax rules of XHTML. This is considered to create well-formed pages and pages that will render on all devices.
- HTML/XHTML tags
- The user does not see that tag, only the text (or other media) displays.
- The first part of the tag (the part immediately after the left angle bracket <, is the tag element.
- Writing the tag is called coding, and the tag is the code.
- The rules for writing the code are called syntax.
- Many tags have one or more attributes with values that allow modification of the element.
- In XHTML strict, the attribute is assigned the value and the value is always contained in quotes. The = operator is called the assignment operator and assigns the value to the attribute. For example:
<tag attribute = "value">
<tag attribute = "value" attribute = "value" >
- HTML5
- HTML 5 is intended to combine features of both HTML and XHTML. This should result in writing simpler code that does not need to adhere to strict XHTML.
- Testing "valid" HTML 5 code is still in the experimental stage. In HTML 5 the goal is to test for "conformance".
- Under the Hood of a Web Page
- Document Type Definition (DTD), commonly called the DOCTYPE, identifies the version of HTML contained in the document.
- Web Page Template - since all HTML pages should include a few standard tags, a template is provided to start each page so that your pages contain these few tags.
- The HTML element indicates that the document is HTML formatted. It is the first tag on the page (below the DOCTYPE) and the closing HTML tag is the last tag on the page.
- The HTML page has two distinct sections, the head and the body. All tags between the open and closing HTML tags must be in either the head or body sections of the page.
- Head Section
- Elements in the head are contained within a set of head tags:
- Title element - Configures the text that appears in the title bar of the browser window. The title is also accessed by search engines for keyword relevance.
- Meta element - Describes the characteristics of a web page that also includes the character encoding via the charset attribute. You need to know which charset is used by the server where your page will reside.
- Body Section
- Contains the text and elements that display on the web page in the browser window. This is called the content of the page.
- Elements in the body section are contained within a set of body tags.