This paradigm is one where the viewer's browser does
much of the presentation work reducing the amount of
information that needs to be transferred across the Net. For
example, you can specify a font (typeface) and expected it
to be rendered only if it is on the viewers machine1. This is
the so called "end-to-end" principal. This principal
identifies where the network "intelligence" is placed. It
states that no service, feature, or restriction should be
forced on the user. These decisions should be left with the
users browser. This forces a sort of network neutrality.
All applications have a level playing field across the network. In
other words it should not matter what operating system, Linux, UNIX,
OS2, Windows or whatever or what browser you are using all should work.
Of course we all know that Bill bent the rules a bit.
Another defining aspect of the Web paradigm is hypertext,
links can be placed in situ like this one to
Ferd's
teaching page. This allows an author to make auxiliary information
immediately available to his/her reader.
It is the view of many that the power of the Internet is derived from
these two factors, neutrality and links.
As the demand increases for "easy" Web design many
WYSIWYG (What You
See Is What
You Get) authoring tools are appearing.
Unfortunately the paradigm for WYSIWYG is quite different from that
of the Web making for a poor fit. For the Web, what is seen at the
design end of the process almost certainly will not be exactly what is
seen at the viewing end. WYSIWYG tools, at least the better
ones, do speed up the design process with one very big proviso, you
need to be proficient at "hand-coding" first. Almost always
the code produced using WYSIWYG authoring tools needs hands-on
adjustment. This is particularly true if you have made adjustments
after the first cut. Under these circumstances WYSIWYG tools cause
the code to deteriorate rapidly adding many, perhaps even
syntactically correct, but unnecessary tags. This code bloat, at the
very least, makes loading slower. In addition it makes maintenance
difficult and confounds some scripts. Further if you don't check the
code then you can't be sure your pages will display the way you want
them to on systems other than your own.
I teach Web design using a simple text (ASCII) editor. My students
therefore experience the code hands-on. These students can then more
easily adapt to any of design tool they may choose to use.
The acronym HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language.
This language
uses <tag> </tag> pairs to form containers. The contents of
each container has the rules of the container applied to it.
For example the text within a boldface container <b> </b>
will render boldfaced. In other words tags determine how
information will be displayed. This display however is
controlled by the browser used to display the information.
CSS add enhancements and consistency to these container
rules. However the presentation is still static.
JavaScripts, often in concert with CSS, can be used to add a
measure of dynamics to the presentation.
It is truly amazing how fast the the details of inspirational HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code fades from memory. One of the "tricks" that helps with the design of successful Web pages is the development of templates. Here our goal is to build a series of fundamental templates.