With the pace of change on the Web, it can be hard to remember that very few people actually keep up with the flood of new technologies, frameworks, and acronyms. Unless you are designing for web-related companies, kms auto it’s very likely that your clients will have no idea what “building a web site” actually entails, or what happens after you’re done designing. In this article, I hope to give you a very high-level overview of the Web that you can point a client to, so that they can understand what goes into a web site besides Photoshop or Flash.
Let’s start with a bit of history. Before any of this Web malarkey came about, you had computer networks. That is to say, people connected individual mainframes (because personal computers didn’t exist yet) with cables so they could talk to each other. PC’s came along, and offices started connecting a building’s PCs together so they could talk. Then something really revolutionary happened: dryer repair san diego people connected one office network with another. Lo and behold, the basis of the Internet as we know it was born.
At its heart, the Internet is a network of networks. In most cases, that smaller network is the 1-4 computers you have in your household, which connect to the larger “Internet” network through your router or cable modem or what have you. There is no “center” of the Internet, no overarching computer directing everything; it’s just millions of small networks like the one in your house or office connecting with one another. There are systems set up to make it so that if your computer says “Connect me with computer XYZ,” it can find a way to make that connection, but those systems (think TCP/IP, routing, etc.) fancy name are too complicated to talk about here.
So the Internet existed, but the Web as we know it did not. The Internet in those days was good for only a few things: email, bulletin boards, provrf and Usenet, among others. Then along came Tim Berners-Lee with his description of a new acronym: HTML. HyperText Markup Language allowed the first web designers (geeky scientists) to create the first web pages. Think of HTML like formatting in Microsoft Word; the words you write are all there, but Word / HTML let you give them some extra meaning. HTML allowed page creators to define their text as paragraphs, bulleted lists, numbered lists, tables of data, and more. Most importantly, HTML allowed page creators to link one page to another – the “HyperText” part of the name – so that related documents could be found quickly and easily.
As I mentioned before, the first users of HTML were geeky scientists. HTML let them format their research papers, and link their papers to the papers they cited. That was about it; plain HTML doesn’t have any real ability to “style” a page outside of identifying what’s a paragraph and what is something more specialized. So the Web was a sea of text, without even a single image in sight.
A few years later, competing ideas about how to give pages some style were merged into a single system, themenu CSS. “Cascading Style Sheets” let page creators make their pages prettier by defining how the “elements” of HTML (lists, paragraphs, etc.) should be displayed. The page creator could now say that all text in paragraphs should be red, that lists should be bulleted with little squares instead of circles, and to say how tall or wide a certain piece of content should be on the screen. Browser makers had added this functionality into their programs (like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) for a while by this point, but CSS did something radical: it separated the content to be displayed from the rules about how to display it. Using CSS, a designer could write two style sheets that made very different looks out of a single HTML page, without making any changes to the HTML.
And yet, despite the promise of CSS, it started out poorly implemented in many browsers, so that what looked fine in, say, Internet Explorer 3 was completely broken in Netscape Navigator 4. So, instead of CSS, many designers (since it was now actually possible to “design” a page!) opted to use HTML’s table ability to lay out all their content. The idea was to use a website like an Excel spreadsheet – make the columns and rows whatever width and height you need, and then fill in each “cell” of the table with an image, or some text, until you get what you want. This led to some nice-looking designs, but completely and totally broke the original ideas of HTML. In a table-based design, the HTML doesn’t have any meaning at all; everything is just a table cell. If the designer you are talking with keeps telling you that “table-based design” is a bad thing, that’s why. Using HTML together with CSS makes a site that loads faster and that actually has some meaning to machines (like Google!), instead of a giant spreadsheet. After all, would you ever try to make artwork or write an article in Excel?
So, we’ve got networks, HTML pages, and CSS stylesheets. How do they all fit together?
If someone wants a site, they first buy a domain name. Buying a domain name gives you the right to assign the name to a particular computer anywhere in the world, of your own choosing. A system called DNS (“Domain Name System”) informs all of the world’s connected networks of where you pointed that name, so that when someone’s computer says “Anyone know how to get to myfavoritesite.com?”, DNS can say “Sure, it’s at computer XYZ over there.”
Computer XYZ, meanwhile, is running a program called a Web server. “Server” is a fancy name that scares people, but all it really means is that computer XYZ is sitting around listening to its wire for anyone to say “Hey, I need the stuff for arborwebsolutions.com,” and once it hears that, it will throw that stuff over the wire. This is what people mean when they say you need to buy “Web hosting” – you need to pay a company to run a computer with server software listening for your domain name, and handing out those files when someone asks for them. You could run your own server right in your living room – plenty of geeks do – but that’s generally more responsibility than most people want to take on. Your monthly hosting charge also means that whoever owns the computer is going to fix things when they break, and generally keep an eye on things for you. If they’re a hosting company worth the money you pay them, at least.
(Side note: “Servers” aren’t just for Web sites. There are email servers that sit around listening for people to say “Hey! Get this letter to Jane Doe!”. There are file servers, usually in offices, that sit around waiting for someone to say “I need that presentation file from last week.” Server programs are everywhere, and every time you have a computer interaction with another computer, you’re probably talking to a server.)
Back to the technology. While CSS was taking shape, the Web also saw the rise of CGI, or “Common Gateway Interface,” abilities. (Note that this is not the same CGI as in movie special effects; that’s “Computer Generated Imagery.” There are only so many combinations of three letters out there.) CGI allowed a programmer to write a program that sat on a Web server and did things more complicated than just handing someone an HTML file or a CSS sheet. With CGI, you could fill out a “form” – those collections of text boxes that let you do things like buy a book on Amazon or log in to Facebook – and do something with that information on the server – like telling Joe in inventory to charge your card and mail you a book, or taking you to your home page on Facebook. CGI isn’t a “language” in itself, it’s just a system, and there are dozens of programming languages that can talk CGI. For more info please visit these sites:-https://brightwell.co.il/ https://go-projects.co.il/ https://populary.co.il/ https://go-projects.co.il/ https://achim-laneshek.co.il/
Hand-in-hand with CGI is the use of databases. Databases let a server hold on to the information you put in those forms, and CGI can either store information into the database or get it back out as needed. So when you make an account at Amazon, they’re holding all of your account info in a database. When you log in, Amazon remembers all sorts of information about you by pulling it out of the database again. Databases let you do more than just accounts, though. If you’ve ever used blogging software like WordPress, Blogger, Joomla!, or any of the dozens of other blog types out there (that includes Facebook status updates or Twitter tweets), you’ve used a database to store your articles. All a blog is doing is storing your articles in the database, and then pulling out the most recent ones whenever someone comes to your website.
