Web Design & Development

[ Web Design & Development Topics ]

The World Wide Web Described

The Web came into being in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed hypertext to link related documents. Before this people used Gopher to connect to data on remote machines. Back in these days Web pages only consisted of text. The first graphical Web browser didn't come around until 1992, this was Mosiac.

The Web came into being in 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee proposed hypertext to link related documents. Before this people used Gopher to connect to data on remote machines. Back in these days Web pages only consisted of text. The first graphical Web browser didn't come around until 1992, this was Mosiac.

IP Addresses

In order for host computers to share information, however, there had to be a way to identify what machine was what. This is where IP addresses come in. An IP address is the address of your machine. It is sort of like a postal address for our homes. It looks something like this: 199.199.254.254. The problem is that people have a hard time remembering an IP address, so along came Domain Name Services to make it easier on us.

Domain Names Services

Domain Name Services basically made text equivalents to our numeric IP addresses. We register these Domain Names (for a cost) and then DNS Servers are used to convert our text address to its digital equivalent.

For example http://74.125.224.72/ is equivalent to http://www.google.com

Universal Resource Locators

Universal Resource Locators, otherwise known as URL's, give information on the Web a specific address or location, making it possible for others to locate that information.

A URL consists of three parts:

URL described

Web Browsers

Web Browsers give us the capability to easily search the Internet by keeping databases of information about sites that exist and what their primary content is.

The most common Web browsers today are:

Surfing the Web

Most people use search engines to find things on the Internet although if you know the URL you can go directly to the site.

Search Engines and meta Search Engines

Some of the most common search engines today include:

Boolean Searching

Almost all search engines use Boolean logic to find results for you.

Basic Boolean Operators
AND

Terms on both sides of this operator must be present somewhere in the document
Example: adults and computer anxiety

OR Terms on either side of this operator are sufficient to be a part of the results
Example: adult students or adult learners
NOT Documents containing the term after this operator are rejected from the results
Example: (adults and computer anxiety) not disabled
NEAR Words must be within a close proximity to one another
Example: online near education
BEFORE First word must come before second word but not necessarily be right next to each other
Example: online before education
AFTER First word must come after second word but not necessarily be right next to each other
Example: education after online
Phrases

Words or terms must appear exactly as shown (usually noted by quote marks)
Example: "distance education"

Wildcards

Results must include characters specified and then any character(s) where the "wildcard" is present (usually noted by a *)
Sample: adult* and computer anxiety
Parenthesis nested operators that are evaluated in an inside-out order of precedence
Sample: (adult students or adult learners) and computer anxiety

References

(1) http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/promotion/searchengines.html