Website Construction for Visual Artists

Basics of the Web

The transfer of digital data from one computer to another (via wires or wirelessness) occurs over the Internet. The term Internet refers to the network of all of these existing (and possible) connections. This is what Matthew Broderick's computer-whiz character in War Games (1983) is accessing with a modem and a command-line interface. When emailing, instant messaging or transferring files via FTP, you're using the Net.

The Web is a network that employs the Internet, but specifically is the network of machines sharing the HTTP protocol, one of the languages of the Internet. Originally, the Web consisted of computers that could share text documents formatted with HTML. The genius of the Web was that it enabled very incompatible computers to share materials, without forcing the owners of those computers to reconfigure their machines for the network. The most significant difference with the Web was to enable users who were not tech-heads to make use of the Internet. It allows us to enjoy images, compositional page formatting, sounds, and animation within the scope of that network (in other words, to see/hear this stuff happening within a browser window). Without the use of the Web, I can still transfer the data that comprises a scanned photograph to another computer, but that image would not be viewable unless the file was opened in a seperate program that permitted such viewing. This is how FTP (File Transfer Protocol) programs work - they use the Internet connections to transfer data, and the FTP-user sees this data abstractly (filenames and folders) and not the sensory manifestations of that data.

Browsers are applications that allow us access the Web. Depending on the company who creates the browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, etc.), the user will have access to numerous features that we associate with being on the Web (such as bookmarking, or forwarding a webpage to a friend). Browsers have a built-in understanding of HTML (the formatting language of webpages) as well as other scripting-languages, and nowadays generally have plug-ins that we desire - such as Quicktime viewers or Flash capabilities. They basically interpret all that data flowing across the Internet lines to give us an experience that we can relate to.

Browsers are also useful as a viewing-application when we are not online. You can drag an unfinished HTML file to the browser to get an idea of how it will look on the Web.

When a website is created at home, it can be viewed only on the browser on that computer. To publish it and make it available to other computers via the Web, the website files need to be placed on a server. A server is a computer that holds files so that they may be accessed through the Internet. In other words, it is a computer that stays online all the time. Generally, people pay a company to get a server account with a limited amount of space and bandwidth. For an individual making personal websites, these limits are generally of little consequence.

A website address is an IP address -- a numerical address for a computer on the network. Since no one wants to remember a string of numbers to find websites, we fortunately can use a URL, which is our quasi-English substitute (such as "www.ecbrown.org"). Numerous URL's can lead a viewer to the same website, if they are all tied to the same IP address.

Next:   Intro to HTML