How does a website work anyway?

The World Wide Web is like a huge electronic magazine with its pages stored on many computers (called "servers") around the world. Pages on the web are connected by links called "hypertext". Each hypertext link jumps to another page... so unlike reading a book where one page follows another in sequence, on the World Wide Web you follow a web of links to visit the information your are interested in.

What is termed "surfing the web" is clicking through one page to another from hypertext link to hypertext link. You can go on an endless adventure from web page to web page, turning back at any time, or going off in tangents.

To access the World Wide Web you need, a computer, a modem or some other connection device to connect to the internet and software on your computer called a "browser"... and an account with an Internet Service Provider. The browser itself is a relatively simple piece of software that interprets a computer code called HTML - or hypertext mark-up language. Most web pages are written in HTML - the browser merely interprets the HTML's instructions to display the text, pictures, play sounds or run animation. The two most popular browsers are Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Safari for Mac users.

To view one of the pages of this electronic magazine, you must open your Web browser and enter the address of a web page you wish to visit. Every HTML document on the Web has a Universal Resource Locator or "URL". This is literally the address of that particular HTML document - where it lives on the web. e.g. http://www.peacecountryontheweb.ca

The "http" stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - it tells your web browser what communication protocol to use to receive the document.

The "www" says that the computer you wish to retrieve information from is a web server on the World Wide Web - a special computer designed to "serve up HTML files".

The next set of words, peacecountryontheweb.ca, is the domain name of the server you are visiting, it's the address of this website on a particular server computer.

The domain name is assigned to a name server which in turn has an IP (internet) address. We use the plain English terms while the computers use the IP address.

The ".ca" means that this particular server is Canadian.

From time to time you will notice an address in the browser window that includes files that end with extensions such as:

.xml - extensible mark up language
.shtml - html with server side includes
.asp - asp server pages
.cfm - cold fusion. Indicates database content.
.php - doesn't stand for anything particular but Indicates database content.

The above are just some of the scripting languages or programming languages.

Questions? contact me, Doug Greenfield at 780-359-2120
editor (at) peacecountryontheweb.ca