Websites

March 09, 2008

What is a website?

As you may have guessed from the URL in the previous chapter, a website is simply a collection of web pages, images, videos and other files that are stored (or hosted) on a server and sent to clients to be displayed in a meaningful manner.

While images and videos are self-explanatory, web pages are of course of special interest to us. A web page is simply a text file written in a language specifically made for describing web pages. This language is called HTML or XHTML (hypertext markup language). Every web page on the internet is written in this way.

You can have a look at the text file (also source or code) of a web page at any time. Let's try it with this one. Follow the instructions below:

Looking at a web page's source code

  1. Right-click on an empty spot on this web page and select View Source or similar option depending on the browser you're using. You can also do the same by going to the menu View arrow View Source.

As you can see it really is just a bunch of funny looking text. Internet Explorer even opens it in Notepad! Now let's try to find some web page text in its actual code:

Finding text in the source code

  1. Look for the the following text in the source code: As you can see it really is just a bunch of funny looking text
    (to speed up the process you can copy above text, go to the source code, open up a search window by pressing Ctrl+F and paste it into the search box).

If everything worked out right you should have found said text 2 times. Maybe you've noticed that one of those texts is wrapped in an opening and closing <em>...</em> tag. These tags are the heart of the HTML language and responsible for describing a web page. They're also what gave this website its name! In this particular example the <em>text</em> emphasizes the containing text by making it italic.

We will be discussing HTML tags in full detail later on in the HTML beginner tutorial.

Web browsers

Having just those HTML files wouldn't be all too useful, we need some computer software that interprets the code and displays it in a human-friendly way.

This is exactly what web browsers do. When you type a website address into their browser bar they will take care of communicating with the web server, downloading the necessary files and presenting them to you in a nice graphical way.

Furthermore they help you navigate through the internet by letting you open links to other documents and by providing you with the ever-useful back and forward buttons. And of course modern browsers nowadays are capable of doing quite a bit more than that.

Web browser market share
Web browser market share as of May 2007 (get the latest statistics)

The 2 most popular web browsers by a large stretch are the Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Ironically Internet Explorer isn't the best web browser at all, even though it's the most used. Its popularity is largely due to the fact that it comes bundled with Windows, the most used operating system for home users.

In fact, web designers have come to dislike Internet Explorer for its relative lack of web standards and annoying CSS bugs.

This often forces web designers to find work-arounds for Internet Explorer, even though their web page looks just fine in other web browsers. These are so called browser incompatibilities.