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 HTML Reference |
| Introduction |
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Regardless of the actual numbers, there are millions of people using the Internet, for a variety of reasons. Most people mainly use the 'Net for Email, but a growing percentage of people use the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web is a world of information! You can access web servers from Argentina, Canada, Finland, Portugal, South Africa and Thailand, and most places in between! There are many thousands of web servers and new servers appear each day! |
| The explosive growth of the Web caught
many people by surprise. The table below shows just how
sudden and recent the expansion has been. At the same
time, the percentage of commercial sites has also
dramatically increased, at the end of 1993 less than 5%
of Web sites were commercial, whereas by the beginning of
1996 the percentage had risen to 50% (Gray,M, Web
Growth Summary, MIT, 1996). During the year from June 1995 to June 1996, the number of World Wide Web servers grew from 23,500 to 230,000. |
 Number of Web Servers (000's) M.Gray, Web Growth Summary, MIT, 1996 |
| Fundamentally, the World Wide Web is a protocol
(http) for publishing and browsing information on the
Internet. The information can be text, images, sound, or
binary data (such as software). To access the information
on the WWW a Web browser is used. Because of the
"point and click" interface of the Web,
browsers are very simple to use! You load another page by clicking on a "hypertext link". Links can be either text (which is normally a different colour) or graphics (which often has a border). The best way to determine whether something is a link is to move the mouse cursor over it - if the cursor changes (usually to a hand) it’s a link! In addition to clicking on the links on the current
page, you can type a Web address (URL); for example if
you wish to load the Faculty of the Built
Environment’s "Online Learning" page, you
would type (in the "address" area near the top
of the browser): A URL generally has three sections, firstly the "service" - this is usually "http", secondly the computer’s name (or "alias"), and finally the path of the page to be displayed. In the example above the service is "http", the computer is "www.fbe.unsw.edu.au" and the path is "/learning/" - the filename is omitted because it is a 'special' name (usually "index.html" or "default.htm"). The services available include: http, ftp, gopher, news and mailto. The explosive growth of the Web has occurred, I believe, because Web browsers provide an easy to use interface for the Internet. Unfortunately, this ease of use does not extend to the creation of pages for the Web. The files that create web pages are plain text but with formatting labels (called "tags") spread throughout, the effect is somewhat similar to an old fashioned word processor. Despite this, it is fairly easy to gain an understanding of this "language". The language used to create Web pages is called HTML (HyperText Markup Language), and as stated above it is made up of "tags" which give browsers instructions on formatting and other options. |
| Versions of HTML |
| One of the complicating factors in creating Web Pages
is the issue of which version of HTML to use! Almost all
Web Browsers support version 2, many browsers support 3.2
(wilbur), and few support version 4 (which will be
finalised in the second half of 1997)... Version 3.2 of HTML extended version 2 to support many of the additions introduced with Netscape (versions 1.1 and 2), but some "Netscapisms" were not included and there are even a few extensions introduced with Microsoft's Internet Exploter were included. These notes will cover the fundamentals of HTML 2 and HTML 3.2. |
 Go to next section: Tags or return to the Contents page. |
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| Last Updated: 15 September 1999 | ||
http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/learning/