Our lecture opened with an analogy: if the Internet is the road infrastructure, then the WWW is the car driving down it. I like analogies :-)
The Internet is an large infrastructure connecting computers across networks. This allows us to share and access information remotely. It forms the building blocks of all online communications.
The World Wide Web (WWW) is the service or the vehicle designed to enable us to use and manage information across the global network we refer to as the Internet.
The Internet facilitates the operation of the WWW: the latter being dependent on the former. In essence, client computers (such as the everyday PCs or laptops we use to surf the web, check emails etc.) send requests for information to all powerful server computers (which store masses of archived data backups) whenever we attempt to access an online resource such as a webpage. The server computer listens out for the requests and by way of acknowledging them, send back the requested information to the client computer. The lines by which the electronic communications travel are the networks, this global network of networks being the Internet.
Everything you see and touch in the online world is anchored: the resource file containing that information will be saved on a hard disk somewhere i.e. it has a physical location. In order to access that file, we need to ask for it. If we know the precise location, it becomes easy to find. We can do this using a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). A typical URL contains the name of the server, domain and the folder and/or sub-folders containing the file on the server computer.
In the lecture notes, a URL is represented using the following formula:
<protocol>://<server dns name >/<local file path in relation to server folder>
http://www.fvspartans.org.uk/clubchamps.shtml
can be broken up into
http:// www. fvspartans .org.uk/ clubchamps.shtml
The first two bits of information tell us that we are seeking a world wide web document and that it is to be transferred to us through the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). The file will seek is therefore a hypertext mark-up language document (HTML) called 'clubchamps', stored on the server machine named 'www' at 'fvspartans', which is part of the domain 'org' in the United Kingdom, or 'uk'. HTML uses a special type of natural language which only exists in the digital world, which links sections of documents or documents to other documents. Text marked up with links is referred to as hypertext.
The practical side of this topic, explored fully in the lab tutorial, looked at the composition of HTML, which is largely a series of content (such as text and images) surrounded by mark-up codes (such as meta tags which define style and format).
We have been asked to generate a simple HTML document and publish it on the City University web server. Due to time constraints, I am only 60% of the way there and hence will be revisiting this topic in the concluding part of this DITA understanding blog 2B.
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