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Gizmos, Inc., Toolkit's webmaking
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It gets confusing when people use "site" to mean every unit from a page to a home page to a web to a web site.
They say, "Go to that site," when they mean "Go to that page." They say, "On that site," when the mean "On that page."
These terms are especially confusing when you're trying to communicate with someone else about web site anatomy and web site management.
W3C's Web Characterization Terminology
The Web has proceeded for a surprisingly long time without consistent definitions for concepts which have become part of the common vernacular, such as "Web site" or "Web page". This can lead to a great deal of confusion when attempting to develop, interpret, and compare Web metrics.
HTML is an acronym for HyperText Markup Language. URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. You might also see URI for Uniform Resource Indicator.
The Internet is the world-wide packet-switched network of computers with IP numbers running one of the common application protocols. Learn more
The Web, properly speaking, is one of those application protocols, HTTP (hypertext transport protocol).
An intranet is the same thing -- packet-switched network of computers with IP numbers running one of the common application protocols -- except it's not world-wide and open to the public. An intranet is usually within the same organization behind a firewall though it can include many geographic locations.
There's the World Wide Web, which I usually capitalize as Web.
Then there's web as coherent collection of linked pages. In that case, a web is whatever the web maker calls it. In the print world, "report" has a similar all-purpose connotation. It's hard to define report because it depends on what kind of report: annual report, project final report, etc.
When a word such as web is this new and this slippery, I might define it best by just using it in a lot of different ways.
You're reading in the Port80 web right now. Gizmos is a web. Dwares is a separate web. What about the Toolkit part of the Gizmos web? What about the webmaking part of the Toolkit part? Sometimes, I call them sections or even neighborhoods, if I'm feeling a little light-headed.
You have a web at Parkside Plaza. It will at some point have a "report" for MBA 600 that up until now would have been on paper with page numbers and staples. Instead, it will be a collection of linked .htm files, or web pages. This "report" will be a web. It is within your Plaza web.
A web is not a directory or folder. For example, your MBA 600 report could all be in a folder at RicciStreet.net/dwares/plaza/yourlastname/mba600/ but could itself have a images folder and three other folders for the three sections of the report. Because you want everything in that mba600 folder to stand alone as a report, we'll call it a web. So there is no one-to-one relationship between webs and folders.
If you are doing the report with two other people, you could each have a section in your own Plaza web, all linked to each other. We'll still call the report a web because it's a coherent whole.
Any one .htm file could be part of more than one web. For example, you could have a resume web that linked to selected examples of your work throughout your Plaza web.
A page is one HTML file, usually with an .htm extension if it resides as a static page on a server. It may have links and embedded images. It can be assembled on the fly from pieces in a database, in which case it probably has an extension like .asp (Active Server Page) or .cfm (Cold Fusion Markup). It can be generated from information you or others provide by a script, in which case it probably has an extension like .pl (Perl) or .cgi (Common Gateway Interface).
A home page is the page that first displays by default when your browser opens. It can also refer to the the page at the top of a website hierarchy, the page that first displays by default if you request the domain, for example, RicciStreet.net or www.macromedia.com. The full URL is www.RicciStreet.net/index.html. For another site, the default page could be Default.htm or home.html or something similar.
If you request a domain or directory, for example, RicciStreet.net/images/ that doesn't have a default page, you'll get an ugly directory dump. Try it and see.
As I use it, a web page and .htm file are synonymous. I use "page" to speak of the content and ".html file" to speak of the HTML code or the geeky parts of site maintenance that don't have anything do to with the content of the page.
A web is a set of linked pages, perhaps a collection of webs, that all have the same domain name. Ricci Street is a web site. Port 80 is a web. Thus Ricci Street is a collection of webs. We can also speak of Ricci Street as a web.
A site is all the linked pages within the same domain. Any .com, .net, .edu, or .org is a top-level domain, or TLD, as are the non-U.S. domains of .au for Australia, .de for Germany, etc.
Rather than the book metaphor, we can use the Ricci Street metaphor. It's a geographical metaphor. It's a navigational metaphor because after you learn it, it helps you navigate the site and talk to others about it.
Ricci Street has neighborhoods: Ricci Green, Digital Wares, Gizmos Inc., CyberSea Inn, and Port 80. I hope it will grow. Each of these neighborhoods has what I'll call "sections" because I don't have a better word. Or I can call the sections "webs". In that sense, Port 80 has six webs: Customhouse, Charthouse, Boardwalk, Lighthouse, Shoreline, Docks.
A browser is a piece of software that knows how to display HTML. The server is the piece of software that keeps files at a fixed Internet address and responds to requests from browsers.
Files are coherent collections of bits that are common units of information, usually documents and images. Each file must have a unique name within its own directory.
Operating systems and applications describe files with given formats by giving them a particular file-name suffix or extension. The extension follows the file name as in homework1.xls or proposal.doc or index.html, where .xls and .doc and .html are the extensions.
A directory or folder is an approach to organizing information. In computer file systems, a directory is a named group of related files that are separated by the naming convention from other groups of files.
For example, the URL of this page is:
http://RicciStreet.net/port80/customhouse/webmaking.htm
The filename is webmaking and its extension is htm. It is in the customhouse directory which is within the port80 directory. RicciStreet.net is the web's root. The /port80/customhouse/ part is the path from the root.
formatting: templates and stylesheets
coding: HTML and XML
scripting: Javascript and Perl
programming: Java and C++
Nope. His name is Tim Berners-Lee and he runs the World Wide Web Consortium at M.I.T. He also won a MacArthur Prize a few years ago.
Web
Had Humble Beginnings
by Anick Jesdanun
Salt Lake Tribune, December 25, 2000
Berners-Lee has no regrets about turning down commercial
opportunities.
In fact, he says, the Web wouldn't have grown in popularity without a someone
pushing for openness and consistency.
"No other businesses would have been prepared to bet their entire company
on the Web, as a huge number of businesses do," Berners-Lee said. "All
the volunteers, all the nonprofit groups would not have done it. Having a
neutral was essential."
Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory of Computer Science at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the Web might not have grown at all
had someone other than Berners-Lee invented it.
"While everybody wanted to make the Web theirs," Dertouzos said,
"he wanted to make the Web belong to everybody."
Berners-Lee says that upon reflection, there was little he would have done
differently -- except perhaps to craft differently the Web addresses known as
uniform resource locators, or URLs.
"I wouldn't have put the double slashes in," he said. "I didn't
realize how much people would be writing these URLs out and reading them out and
how much time it takes for people to say 'slash slash.' "
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