Web Design with HTML and CSS

28

How web pages work

Web Design with HTML and CSS Digital Classroom

The web server is a computer that is much like a desktop PC. It generally runs either a version

of Microsoft Windows Web Server or UNIX, but it may have additional processing power

and redundant systems to handle traffi c from thousands of users at the same time. Web servers

maintain a constant connection to the Internet, so your websites are available 24 hours a day.

Because most companies want their web servers to be available all day, every day, they are

often maintained by web hosting companies. These fi rms are paid to maintain your web

server so that it is always accessible and running. If you run a small website, they may put

your site on a server that is shared with other sites. For more demanding sites, or sites with

sensitive information, a business will pay higher fees for a dedicated server. Even large

companies will often turn to hosting businesses to maintain their web servers, although some

companies may elect to place their web servers within their own company.

The language of the web

Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, uses tags that enclose plain text. The tags describe

how the text should appear and the function of the text. The web browser looks at the tags

and displays them accordingly. A simple example of HTML text is:

<p>Do you want to have lunch?</p>

The text to be displayed, Do you want to have lunch?, is wrapped by two tags

indicating that it is a paragraph. The fi rst tag is the opening tag <p> and the second is the

closing tag </p>. These tags are generally not displayed in the browser, which reads the text

from the web server and formats the text as a paragraph to display on the viewer’s screen.

HTML also lets designers create hyperlinks. Hyperlinks are areas of text, images, buttons, or

other parts of a page where the viewer can click to navigate to additional content. Clicking a

link can open a new web page, site, document, video, or animation.

The evolution of the web and web standards

HTML is interpreted by web browsers, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.

Web designers have discovered that the same HTML code might be displayed diff erently on

various web browsers. Because web browsers can interpret HTML code diff erently, you will

need to consider browser testing in your design considerations, which we cover in more detail in

Lesson 10.

In the early days of the web, some browser developers created proprietary HTML tags.

They created tags that were supported by only their browser, as they hoped that the unique

capabilities might draw more users.