Explaining Web sites

By Tyler Downer
2/9/08

Web sites

They are major parts of our modern lives. We visit them, find information from them, buy and sell using them. But they are a black box to the majority of end users who visit them each days, billions of them. They may notice a particularly interesting design or shocking bandwidth eater, and wonder how it was done. Now you will learn how and why web sites are what they are.

All web sites have one thing in common, the use HTML (HyperText Markup Language), to build their foundation. No matter how much fancy content a web site has, it almost always uses some variant of HTML to get the job done. Our What is XHTML article explains more of the details of this language. Most sites also have images that convey feeling and dress up the site. The picture of the grass to the right of the article is a example of this. These large images are usually the reason that a web sites takes a long time to appear.

More and more web sites nowadays are what is called dynamic. They run off of a database of information that places what you want to see on the screen and can change every time you look at it. This usefull in a large site, with many categories and products. They are drawn directly from a database. Other web sites use technologies like JavaScript to show changing content like the time on a web site. Some use expensive, slow, but exciting things like Flash. This is a multimedia presentation that acts more like a vide game than a normal web site. Many sites use a combination of technologies. The SOS InfoCenter site for example, uses XHTML, Javascript, and a Flash derived technology for displaying fonts.

Where is a site kept? Obviously not on your computer. Instead web sites are kept on a large and fast computer called a web server. These are always connected to the Internet and usually rent space out to web site owners to keep their sites on. When you request a website through a browser like Firefox, your computer connects to a Server, downloads the files, displays them on the screen, then deletes them after a short time. That is web sites explained.

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