Most people undoubtedly have been on the Internet visiting web sites via a web browser such as Internet Explorer, AOL, FireFox, etc. This post will go over some of the basic terminology associated with web sites. I prefer to quote Wikipedia for specific definitions but will elaborate when deemed beneficial. I highly recommend Wikipedia for looking up terms that you are not familiar with.
The first step in browsing the web and accessing a web site is launching a browser on your computer. A browser is defined as “a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, and other information typically located on a web page at a website on the World Wide Web.” The web browser is an application which is installed on your computer. Most computers come with a web browser installed when you purchase them. You can also download additional browsers for free from other websites.
Some of the more pervasive web browsers out there are:
- Internet Explorer (Microsoft)
- FireFox (Mozilla)
- Opera (Opera Software)
- Safari (For Apple computers)
A browser without an Internet connection is somewhat useless. An Internet connection provides the capability for your web browser to connect to another computer based upon a domain name. A domain name is the address which you type into your web browser to access a site such as http://www.spartansoft.net, where spartansoft.net is the domain name. Every domain name needs to be unique across the entire Internet and must be purchased for a small fee. This domain is name used to provide a friendly name for an IP address. An IP address is a number such as 64.79.161.51 which uniquely identifies an end point or web site on the Web. This prevents users from memorizing these hard to remember number sequences.
A web site resides on a web server. A web server is a computer who’s main purpose is to host web sites. When a user types in a domain name in their browser this request gets routed to a web server who then sends back a web page to the browser. The page comes back in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and is interpreted by the browser and displayed. I will have provide a detailed post on HTML in the future.If you want to see what html looks like in
- Internet Explorer - Right click on page and select View Source
- FireFox - Right click on page and select View Page Source
There are many companies who host web sites for a monthly fee.
More to come in the future….
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