WHAT IS A WEB SITE, EXACTLY?

• A Web site is made up of files and folder (directories)    -- It looks just like the stuff on your hard drive, because that’s what it is, essentially.
• A Web page, like the MSN home page, is just a computer file.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Think of a site needing three computers:
1. A site is built on your computer
2. You upload the site to a server computer
3. A user dowloads the site from the server onto his computer

There are three types of software needed to build a site
1. an application to write the file
2. an application to send the file to the server
3. an application to receive the file from the server

The three applications types are called:
1. An HTML editor (we'll use Dreamweaver)
2. An FTP client (we'll use WS-FTP)
3. A Web browser (we'll use Internet Explorer as our client)

--> Look again at MSN.com on your Web browser. Where are the site files you are viewing?
They are in your computer’s hard drive. No, you are not viewing something remote, your browser has downloaded the files, and you’re seeing files that are now on your own hard drive (well, 99.9% of the time—the alternative is streaming content.)

Internet Explorer is a client that makes contact with a remote server, then downloads the site files you request; it puts them in a cache folder, then displays them in the browser window. --> From IE on PC, find “Internet Options” go to Tools > General and the cache is called “Temporary Internet Files” (From IE’s menu on Mac, choose “Explorer” and go to Preferences > Web Browser > Advanced. You’ll see settings for IE’s cache.)

HOW DO WE DO IT?

--> Look at your Web browser IE, go to the menu an click on “View,” then pull down to “Source.” You should now be looking at the code that creates the words and images on the MSN home page. The page is written in code that a Web browser reads, then the browser creates builds a display of the page.

• Web pages are built using HTML or “Hypertext Markup Language.”
• HTML is a markup language comes in many versions and flavors, and many work simultaneously on up-to-date browsers. We will write HTML that is compliant with XML, which is the coming standard for moving content between all platforms and applications (!!), usually called XHTML.