Class 1 – What is the web?

Posted: February 14th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: course info | Tags: | No Comments »

WHAT THIS CLASS IS ABOUT?

What we call “the web“, or World Wide Web, has been around for less than 20 years.  However, in that time, content on the web has exploded, spawning a wide variety of technologies and practices in its stead.  This class addresses the core technologies and techniques used to make the vast majority of “websites” and “web applications“.  At the end of the class, you will have an in-depth understanding of how most websites are made.

Specifically, we will be covering XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL in detail.  We will also delve into XML, RSS, and Ajax.  Most semester-long courses will only cover one or two of these technologies, so this class is necessarily fast paced and intensive.  Every class builds off of the material from the last class and homeworks.  So please ask questions when you don’t understand something, and do your homework diligently, or you will find yourself falling behind quickly.

WHAT’S A WEB SITE?

The web is a network of interconnected hypertext documents, meaning documents that link to each other.  For this class, we’ll differentiate between “web sites”, which are defined primarily by their content; and “web applications”, which are defined by their functionality. So, for example, Yahoo mail and Google mail, would be web applications, as would Facebook.  The New York Times and NYU.edu would be web sites.  This is often an arbitrary distinction for many sites which combine heavy content with lots of functionality.

WASN’T THE WEB INVENTED BY TIM BERNERS-LEE?

Yes.  Tim Berners-Lee is the original inventor of the world wide web.  However, the concept of hypertext, which is the core upon which the web rests, is credited, by historians, to Vannevar Bush, who described such links between things in his July 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay, “As We May Think“, which concerned itself with indexing human knowledge.  Unfortunately, this course is not about the history or theory of the internet, so this is about as much as we will cover.


IS THIS DOCUMENT A WEB SITE OR A WEB APPLICATION?

Good question.  This site has been created using WordPress, a blogging software that allows one to quickly publish websites using design templates that are suitable for displaying pages with regularly-updated content, such as journal and news sites.  You are presumably somewhat passively reading the content of this page in a web browser.  So for you, the reader, it is the content of this site that’s most important and obvious to you, hence this would fall under what we’ve defined as a web site.

However, I am currently writing this blog post in an entirely different interface of the same product, WordPress.  I’m using the administrative interface, which has a very different design and functionality than the page you are currently viewing.  The reason I am using this software is because of its smart functionality, so I would call this part of the site a web application.  You can see that the difference between a web site and a web application can be blurry for some sites which offer both kinds of user interfaces.

HOW DO YOU MAKE A WEB SITE?

Be patient.

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