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The Basics of Building Web Pages and Sites 1
There is, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. It may concern an Easter
egg. Those who have Firefox let them see ...about:Mozilla.
Book of Mozilla 7:15 .
As for the best of the best, about two years ago extensive tests were run by a very committed,
highly organized, and methodical programmer named Mark Wilton-Jones in the United Kingdom.
His subsequent tables of results were endlessly copied in both print and electronic media. If you
are curious (and it is quite interesting material), you should visit his Web site at
www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html to see his rigorously tested results.
Web Pages
A Web page is a document that is written in (or convertible to) HTML and that is accessible to
Web browsers so that they can upload or download content. The Web page, if online, is found
by an address. The address is in the format of
http://www.goto.com/goinggoing/gone and
is frequently referred to as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
This chapter does not delve into a technical discussion regarding the differences
between
URL , URI ,and URN . Berners-Lee (the creator of the above address schema),
uses universal resource identifier (URI) when referring to an Internet address. The reference to the
address of the Web page is URL for academics and for the rest of us. For more information on the
differences in terminology, see
http://gbiv.com/protocols/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html#RFC1630,
which provides a thorough explanation of the reasoning behind the development of specific fea-
tures of Web addresses.
URLs (or addresses) are broken down into three parts:
■ Protocol — This is the name of the ‘‘language’’ that is used to transport the data
across the network from source address to destination address. The language used to
transfer document content is Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). Recall that the
format of the Web page is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), so it is easy enough
to associate the transport method (HTTP) with what is being transported (HTML), since
both are hypertext. The two forward slashes following the protocol essentially indicate
to the Web browser, ‘‘this is where you start your business and ignore anything to the
left of the //.’’
■ Domain — This is a two-part name separated by a dot (.) that identifies a particular
institution or group. The first section before the dot is some specific corporate entity,
and the part following the dot is a suffix that defines the top-level domain of the cited
entity. For example,
yahoo.com indicates an organization referenced by the domain
name.
Yahoo belongs to the top-level domain, and com further defines yahoo as a
commercial business. Other top-level domains with which you are probably already
familiar include
gov for government sites, org for nonprofits, mil for military sites,
net for network organizations, mobi for mobile, and edu for educational sites.
■ Webpage(fileorfolder) — After the domain name comes the forward slash (/) or
multiple slashes that define the path to the specific Web page. The addressing scheme
is hierarchical, and the address goes from the general to the specific. The Web page the
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