There are millions of websites, literally. How are they set up, built,
and published? This week we start a series exploring how it has become
so easy and so cheap to get yourself read globally – and why this may
not be a good thing.
Once upon a time, creating a webpage involved writing a text file full
of obscure codes mixed in with the text to be published. This was the
arcane art of HTML editing. HTML or HyperText Markup Language is the
'language' used by a web browser to display a webpage according to its
designer's intentions. For example, if you want a heading, you would
put <H1> at the start of it and </H1> at the end of it, and
the browser would recognise these as the start and end of text that
should be displayed large and bold.
You can see the HTML for any
webpage by clicking “View” at the top of your Internet Explorer and
then choosing “Source” in the resulting drop-down menu. Imagine having
to write all that in a text file, and having to remember exactly where
you started each pair of heading or emphasis or italic or any number of
other control codes. Fairly soon, people got fed up with this. And so
the HTML Editor software industry was born.
Quite quickly,
HTML Editors evolved into what you can find today. These are pretty
much equivalent to word-processing software ie. you use them to create
a webpage much as you use Word to create a document. If you want bold,
you highlight the text and click the Bold button, and Voilà!, it is
bold. Want a table? Click the Table button and type in the number of
rows and columns. Microsoft FrontPage is a popular if technically
inferior HTML Editor.
Note that a webpage is distinctly
different in layout to a document. Documents are generally for
printing, webpages are generally for reading on-screen in a browser.
Thus, layout and presentation do need to be different, and the skill
and experience of a webpage publisher is very easy to judge. Does it
flow well, is it readable, does it look good? Many word-processing
packages provide the ability to convert an existing document to an HTML
equivalent, but if you've viewed these in a web-browser you will know
that it is not a sensible thing to do without a bit of re-working of
the webpage.
Lately, the HTML Editing facility has moved online.
Now you no longer need to obtain and install an HTML Editor on your
computer to be able to generate webpages – you build them in your
website as you go. You use a webpage to make a webpage. The same
functionality is there ; headings, bold, tables, images, links, and all
in a WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) format.
Next week – we know how to make a webpage, so now what?
Discuss
this or any other IT topic online with VIGNET (Vanuatu Internet User
Group) - register free at
http://lists.spc.int/mailman/listinfo/vignet_lists.spc.int All welcome!
Any
IT questions & comments? Email
- Tony Phelps
is part of the Merlin Pacific IT team, dedicated to effective &
efficient business IT.
