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Thinking Like a Web Publisher 9Nearly all large corporations and medium-sized businesses and
organizations are using web technology to manage projects, order
materials, and distribute company information in a paperless envi-
ronment. By locating their documents on a private, secure web
server called an intranet, they take advantage of the technologies
the World Wide Web has to offer while keeping the information
contained within the company.The Web Is Cross-Platform
If you can access the Internet, you can access the World Wide Web, regardless of
whether you’re working on a smartphone, a tablet, a brand new laptop, or a desktop com-
puter you bought at the flea market. If you think Windows menus and buttons look bet-
ter than Macintosh menus and buttons or vice versa (or if you think both Macintosh and
Windows people are weenies), it doesn’t matter. The World Wide Web isn’t limited to
any one kind of machine or developed by any one company. The Web is entirely cross-
platform.
Cross-platform means that you can access web information equally well from any com-
puter hardware running any operating system using any display.
NOTEThe Cross-Platform Ideal
The whole idea that the Web is—and should be—cross-platform is strongly held to
by purists. The reality, however, is somewhat different. With the introduction over
the years of numerous special features, technologies, and media types, the cross-
platform nature of the Web has been compromised. Web authors can choose to
use nonstandard features, like Flash, but in doing so they limit the potential audi-
ence for their site, especially as more and more people switch to smartphones and
mobile devices to view the Web. Web publishers also must choose between creating
native applications for mobile devices or using modern web standards to build web
applications that are more cross-platform compatible. It’s up to individual creators to
decide whether to compromise cross-platform flexibility for the greater capabilities of
a proprietary platform.The Web Is Distributed
Web content can take up a great deal of storage, particularly when you include images,
audio, and video. To store all the information published on the Web, you would need