ptg164760528 LESSON 1: What Is Web Publishing?
Thinking Like a Web Publisher
You’re almost certainly already familiar with the Web as a user. You open your favorite
web browser and visit websites where you look up information, shop, or keep up with
what your friends are doing. You may also use your web browser to read your email,
check your calendar, and do your work.
Being a web publisher means understanding what happens when you enter an address in
your web browser or click a link and visit a website. But first, before I get into explaining
the Web at a technical level, I want to define it at a conceptual level.
The Web is
n A hypertext information system
n Cross-platform
n Distributed
n Dynamic
n InteractiveSo, let’s look at all these words and see what they mean in the context of how you use
the Web as a publishing medium.The Web Is a Hypertext Information System
The idea behind hypertext is that instead of reading text in a rigid, linear structure (such
as a book), you can skip easily from one point to another. You can get more information,
go back, jump to other topics, and navigate through the text based on what interests you
at the time.
Hypertext enables you to read and navigate text and visual information in a nonlinear
way, based on what you want to know next.
When you hear the term hypertext, think links. (In fact, some people still refer to links as
hyperlinks.) Whenever you visit a web page, you’re almost certain to see links through-
out the page. Some of the links might point to locations within that same page, others
to pages on the same site, and still others might point to pages on other sites. Hypertext
was an old concept when the Web was invented—it was found in applications such as
HyperCard and various help systems. However, the World Wide Web redefined how
large a hypertext system could be. Even large websites were hypertext systems of a scale
not before seen, and when you take into account that it’s no more difficult to link to a
document on a server in Australia from a server in the United States than it is to link to a
document stored in the same directory, the scope of the Web becomes truly staggering.