Beginner FAQs

What is the World Wide Web?

The world wide web – we’ll just call it the web – is an ever changing network of computers and hardware located all over the world. You are hooked up to the world wide web right now reading this article.

Computers on the web talk to each other using a variety of languages and protocols. These are changing all the time, too.

The “rules” for the web are formulated by W3C – the World Wide Web Consortium. They have drafted and are continually working on a number of “standards” that are supposed to determine how the Web works. Unfortunately every browser has a greater or lesser conformance to the recommended standards. To find out more about this situation, type browser web standards conformance in your favorite search engine and read some of the articles.

What is a browser?

A browser is software used to view web pages on a computer. The most popular browsers are Internet Explorer (see comments about lesser conformance to web standards above...) and FireFox. A browser sends a request to a server for a web page. When the page is received by the browser it interprets the instructions contained in the page and displays the data on the monitor.

Actually, browsers do a lot more, but this is the short version.

BestWebTutorials.com is proud to recommend FireFox as our browser of choice. FireFox is available free and there are hundreds of extensions that can be added to improve your web surfing and web site development. Go to Mozilla.com to download Firefox.

What is a web server?

A web server is a computer that sends web content to a browser.

What is a web client?

A web client is either the computer or the program that receives web content from a server. Some purists might argue that the program, and not the computer is the client. So why then all the talk about the client machine...?

What is scripting?

Scripting can be either server side or client side. Server side scripting is used to generate the XHTML that is then sent by the server to the client. Client side scripting is used on the client computer to provide interactivity to a web page.

What is a database?

A database is a method of storing data for easy storage, retrieval and manipulation by a computer.

What is a hosting company?

A hosting company provides space on their servers for web sites. Hosting companies might also provide domain registration services.

BestWebTutorials.com proudly recommends our hosting company, IXWebhosting.com. For more information please click on the banner ad at the bottom of this page.

What do I need to make a web page?

Making a web page can be very simple or as complex as you’d like to make it. The simplest web page can be made with just a text editor like Notepad on a Windows system or SimpleText on a Mac. Remember, an XHTML file is just text enclosed in markup tag pairs.

You can go directly to our beginning XHTML tutorial and try it for yourself

The XHTML file is saved as a text file with an .htm or .html extension. This file doesn’t have to be uploaded to a server, it can just be opened and viewed with a browser. Most of the XHTML, CSS and JavaScript examples on this site can be created and tested on your own computer using only a simple text editor and a browser.

Making a web page can involve much more than just a text editor. There are many web development programs available. They range in price from free to hundreds of dollars. Each has relative strengths and weaknesses. Some will write a great deal of code for you when given certain commands. That code is not always compact or even correct.

It will be to your advantage to learn as much as you can about XHTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL and JavaScript before letting a high end editor start churning out code for you. You might have to fix it so it actually works!

Where do I store my files?

Your files will probably be stored in two places. As you develop web pages the files for those pages will probably be created on your computer. Sometime during the development process, you will probably transfer those files to your web hosting company, where their servers will make the content available to web surfers.

Even though it’s early in the process, you should probably give thought to how you are going to manage your files. A site of only a dozen pages could consist of over 100 files by the time you count things like graphic files, sound files, scripts, PDFs, etc. If you carefully organize your directories and the way you name files, you will save yourself a great deal of grief as your site grows.

How do I upload my files?

You will probably upload your files to your web host with some sort of FTP program. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol.

FTP is built into some web development software. In other cases you may have to use a separate FTP program. There are built in FTP tools in Internet Explorer and there is a particularly fine FTP extension available for FireFox.

You probably won’t have to understand the technical aspects of what is happening in FTP. For the most part, you just point and click and it happens.

What is upload? What is download?

Upload is the process of sending files from your computer to your web host, to an FTP server, etc. Upload means from YOU to someone else.

Download is the process of accepting files into your computer from a web site, and FTP server, etc.

Why does this site keep using XHTML instead of just HTML?

XHTML is the next standard that will be widely adopted. At it’s simplest, the X means that HTML is now an XML application. Don’t panic – all you need to know right now is that every markup tag must have a corresponding closing tag. For example:

<p>This is a paragraph. Note that it has a beginning and ending tag. Tags are usually enclosed between “<” and “>” symbols.</p>

HTML would only require the first tag to show the start of a paragraph. Then it would think that everything that followed was a part of that paragraph until it encountered another tag. Again this is a gross oversimplification, but it gets the point across.

It is really very little effort to learn to always use beginning and ending tags. If you will use tags properly from the very beginning it won’t seem like any work at all.

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