PC Workshop:
Webmakingother pages about Webmaking
browser | plug-ins | HTML | your first web page | web page anatomy
links | web site anatomy | file transfer protocol |
site management system | weblog | page-editing software | FrontPage |
style sheets | Document Object Model | mouseoversother sections in the PC Workshop
operating system | business media
collaboration | office productivity | webtop servicesother Ricci Street pages
mba 504 | mba 600
basic skills formthis page
browser | plug-ins | HTML | your first web page | web page anatomy |
links | web site anatomy | file transfer protocol |
site management system | page-editing software | FrontPage |
style sheets | Document Object Model | mouseovers
When I first started teaching writing to college students, they said, "But I'm going be a college graduate and I'll have a secretary."
When I started teaching word processing, they said, "But I'm going to be in management and I'll have a secretary."
When I started teaching PowerPoint presentations, they said, "But I'm not an artist. I'm not creative. I don't have any talent. This isn't art school. My company will have a template for me."
Now I'm teaching webmaking and they say, "But, I'm in marketing (or finance or HR or accounting or production or customer service). Why in the world would I be making web pages? My company hires highly trained computer technicians to run our intranet."
My answer has always been, "You should be so lucky."
Listen to Steve Telleen, a management consultant, in Do You Really Want an Intranet?
Unofficial applications and information seem to be the
trademark of intranets. Many information managers in large corporations report
that the first time they ran a web crawler on their intranet, 30% of the web
servers that showed up were previously unknown to them. And, nearly every MIS
group that has a TCP/IP network, but not a formally endorsed intranet,
acknowledges a few "unofficial" web servers already operating behind
their firewall. This happens because the technology is so easy to use that
anyone with a moderate level of computer savvy, and a computer already hooked to
a TCP/IP network, can figure out how to become a web server.
Depending on your corporate culture, this is either the strength or the peril of
an intranet. Employees quickly discover that they can deliver information to
each other more quickly over the intranet by cutting out previously required
steps. However, when some of these steps were management control points, the
result can be management ire. This can turn into an opportunity to evaluate and
re-engineer the contribution of management in the quality process, or, it can
become a bitter power struggle.
New media is so new that we do not know it is best used, nor do we know how it will affect us. To understand, we have to use our imaginations. We're trying to learn:
new ways to communicate: graphics, images, interactivity
how to use the technologies, specifically the Web, that are converging to create new media
new ways of thinking about what these technologies can cause: community-building, disintermediation, resentful bosses.
I assume that you will get paid for how you apply your imagination to see the possibilities for your organization and to move it in that direction. You will have to evaluate your own work. To help motivate that self-evaluation, the skills in the Toolkit are conducive to hirings, raises, and promotions.
While email is replacing letters and memos and newsletters, the web page is replacing reports and presentations in the same way and for the same reason. They are the new basic forms of business communication, the new literacy. Yes, I'm serious about that. To not know how to make a web will be like not knowing how to write a report, which we learned in grade school. Email and the Web might not have replaced paper in your company, as it hasn't in mine. But it will.
Just for starters, email and the Web have replaced paper in my courses.
To make a web page, you mark up the text with some special instructions that a web browser knows the rules for displaying. The instructions are called tags and the rules are called HTML, hypertext markup language.
HTML is a very succinct and abbreviated language, more like a code, because there's only so much the browser can do. In fact, it's called coding and is much less complicated than scripting or, heaven forbid, ... the p-word, programming.
Hypertext's distinguishing feature is linking, making a word, phrase, or image "hot", which means that clicking on it will cause another page to appear.
Though these terms are used interchangeably by most people, a web page is one text file written in HTML, usually with the extension .htm or html. A web site is one or more web pages linked to each other and stored by you in the same folders on a web server. A web as I use it without the "site" part is a coherent collection of pages, regardless of where they are on a server.
You need to know how to make web pages and maintain a web site. If you know a little about jazzing them up with some Javascript, that would be good, too.
Learn more about webmaking terms such as page / site and Internet / intranet.
Marshall Brain's How Stuff Works
How Web Pages Work
Web page creation is both incredibly easy and a lot of fun. By the time you finish reading this article, you will be ready to start assembling your own!
How Web Servers and the Internet Work
What happened behind the scenes to bring this page onto your screen? If you've ever been curious about the process, or have ever wanted to know some of the specific mechanisms that allow you to surf the Internet, then this edition of How Stuff Works will be a real eye opener for you. You will learn about the Internet, and how Web browsers and Web servers use it to bring pages into your home, school or office.
The End of Books
by Robert Coover
NY Times, June 21, 1992
Students are notoriously conservative creatures. They write
stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read. Getting
them to try out alternative or innovative forms is harder than talking them into
chastity as a life style.
But confronted with hyperspace, they have no choice: all the comforting
structures have been erased. It's improvise or go home.
Some frantically rebuild those old structures, some just get lost and drift out
of sight, most leap in fearlessly without even asking how deep it is (infinitely
deep) and admit, even as they paddle for dear life, that this new arena is
indeed an exciting, provocative if frequently frustrating medium for the
creation of new narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, exactly
as advertised, of transforming the very art of [writing], even if it now remains
somewhat at the fringe, remote still, in these very early days, from the
mainstream.
use a
browser, common plug-ins, and file transfer software
read
web page source code and write HTML
with clear, consistent links
use
web page-editing and site-management software, for
example, blogware or Microsoft's FrontPage
use style sheets and the document object model,
starting with JavaScript mouseovers, to better manage
web page presentation
text editor, web browser, blogware FrontPage, FTP client
You probably won't be surprised to learn how much you can do to optimize your browser. You can change almost everything about it, including the "skin" that covers it.
Where the browser ends is where the fun stuff begins: videos and animations and services available only on the Web. To participate, you'll need special software that gets "plugged in" to your browser.
To protect you from the horrors of HTML, industries have sprung up, millionaires have been made. Here's the dirty little secret: HTML isn't that horrible at all. People's fears keep them ignorant, keep them from basic information literacy, reading and writing HTML. After you learn how to read and write it, you will be literate and you will have a job skill that will distinguish you from most other MBA's.
Step-by-step in short, easy lessons, it's easy to hand-code your first web page. That's just the first lesson! In the second and third, you can use the first page as a template for a second page, link the two pages together, and embed an image.
To supplement the many terrific WWW sites that help you learn to make webs, this anatomy of a web page looks at it tag by tag. The comments on each will give you an overall sense of what you're doing.
Hyperlinks distinguish webs from other forms of text. Not all links are the same. Knowing how links look and behave differently will make you a more efficient web researcher as well as web maker.
What is a URL and what does it tell you about what's on the site? What's behind the scenes? Where exactly are the files? The anatomy of a web site is there for all to see.
Many make the argument that the Internet is the greatest thing since Gutenberg's printing press. If so, then what replaces the printing press itself? What lets you "publish" to the web as easily as you can save to your C: drive? It's a geeky process called file transfer protocol. A nifty piece of free software turns it into a four-click process that you hardly have to think about after you get it set up. Gutenberg never had it so easy.
In grade school, you learned how to make a linear printed report. Number the pages in order and put a staple in the corner of the stack of pages. Online, what replaces the page numbers and staple? For the users, it's the navigation system. For the web maker, it's the site management system, how the folders and files are named and nested.
After you know enough HTML to be literate, to read and write web pages, you can use web editing software to greatly reduce your clicks and keystrokes. Think about the content of your pages instead of the tool.
Microsoft's FrontPage might not be the best page-editing software, but it is a handy site management tool. It provides you with a range of options and settings to make your job easier, that is, to further reduce your clicks and keystrokes.
You have several pages in a web. You want to reduce your users' cognitive load by giving a consistent look and feel to the whole web. You want it to have some style. You may well want to change that style on a moment's notice. The trick is to separate content from presentation in a way not possible in the print world. Online, style sheets are the best way to give your web the look you want.
Now that your web has the look you want, what about its behavior? If you can separate content from style, can you separate content from behavior? Again, it's not possible in the print world for a page to behave. It's inert. So learning how to make your web behave involves a different model of what a document is. It's made up of objects, all of which can have names and thus attributes and behaviors. Put it together and you have the Document Object Model. Then you script the behavior and your web starts to fulfill its promise of interactivity.
Putting it all together, you can start to make your links behave. You can change them when the users' mouse passes over them. On the Ricci Street home page, you can see an example. Using style sheets and Javascript, you can better manage web page presentation by making your own simple mouseovers.
Let's take a snapshot of your web browsing. Many of you seem stuck with a screen size of 800 x 600 on your laptops and 256 colors. I recommend that you have the largest screen width and height you can as well as the greatest number of colors available. You may find a trade-off between screen size and color. The one can go only so high before the other starts going down.
If you don't mind my showing you, here's what you're using now:
How did I get that to display on a Ricci Street web page? Well, you might be surprised at what else your computer tells other computers on the Web. If you're concerned about security, you might want to learn more.
Geek Alert | Do a view source for this page and check out the JavaScript about two-thirds of the way down between the script tags. Pare away the HTML and there's not much left.
Here's mine:
Color (in number of colors) 16777216 colors
Color (in bit-depth) 24-bit
Screen resolution (in pixels) 1280 X 1024
Step-by-step, how to change your settings.
Tip | If you plug a larger, higher-resolution monitor into your laptop, you will want to adjust these settings whenever you go back and forth.
Compare your snapshot to everyone else's. WebSnapshot publishes up-to-the-day stats on worldwide Web usage patterns and user profiles. How do your settings compare? How do your customers' settings compare?
What Is My IP Address? Ever wonder, 'what is my IP address?' FREE IP Address Service.
Certified Internet Webmaster: designer, networking, and development; links to approved training providers.
Online Learning's CD-ROM-based courses: tech writing, XML, style sheets, HTML, C, and server programming.
Element K: networking, Microsoft Windows® NT® and SMS, Macintosh, ASP, web development tools (Illustrator®, FrameMaker®, Photoshop®, FrontPage®, Director, Dreamweaver, Flash, Corel products, and others), Cold Fusion, Crystal Reports, DHTML, XML, C, C++, Java™, Unix, Linux, Perl, Visual Basic®, web database integration, SQL, NetWare, and Oracle.
Barnes & Noble University offers free courses in a variety of "soft" subjects as well as introductory tech skills.
DigitalThink: C, C++, Java, and Microsoft, Adobe, Lotus, Oracle, Linux, and Unix products.
Kaplan College School of Information Technology: Microsoft certification in solution developing, network engineering, and database administration.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
