2: Websites?
What's happening under the surface of a web page?
Expectations
Learning Targets
I can describe how web pages are displayed on my browser using HTTP and HTML.
I can create a basic HTML page.
Assignments
You will construct an HTML page from scratch in a guided class activity.
You will complete HTML and CSS courses on codecademy.com
World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee
If one person had to be named as the creator of the Internet, it might be Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. More specifically, he created the World Wide Web while working at CERN. It was a way of transferring information over the TCP/IP network talked about in last chapter.
No more Microfiche
The "Internet" we think of is primarily the contents of our web browser. Trying to find information by tediously scanning film after film was not fun. People like Tim Berners-Lee wanted to link text together. So touching one word might connect you to relevant information without having to manually search for hours.
The most important part of a website remains the hyperlink.
HTTP sends HTML
HyperText Transfer Protocol is a set of rules to pass information (like the HTML layout of a web page) over a network. HTML is a markup language. It describes the structure and content of a page. So when you type in an web address like google.com into your browser, you're sending a GET request to the Google server. It responds with an HTML package that your browser renders into a familiar display.
Structure of HTML
Tags and Elements
A tag looks like this: <tag> </tag>
The stuff that's between the opening <tag> and the closing </tag> is what's inside that element. The first and most important element in a web page is a hypertext link. If I wanted to make a link that went to Google.com, it would look like this: <a href="google.com">this is my link</a>
The term tag describes the structure of the <opening> and </closing>. The element is what type of object is being built by the tag, (an a is a hyperlink). The contents of an element is whatever is between the open and closing tag of an element. The property="value" pair that goes inside of an HTML tag is called an attribute.
Page Structure
Every web page has to have a <!DOCTYPE html> at the very start to tell your browser that yes, this block of text is HTML and it should render it into a display. The <html> element does something very similar. Every page you've ever seen online has been the contents of an HTML tag.
The <head> element isn't seen by the user. The contents of the head allow you to connect other resources to the page, such as fonts or CSS.
CSS is HTML's Sidekick
CSS has its own style rules. But you drop it into an HTML head like any other HTML, <style> css goes here </style>. You can put the CSS in the HTML file, but the better way is to keep your CSS in a separate file. In that case, you use a <link> element instead to connect the .css file.
Practice
Additional Training
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