In this episode, we’ll introduce you to the internet, give you a simple framework for how the web works as well as introduce you to what a website is on a practical level.
Not A Series of Tubes An Internet Primer
Despite popular belief, the internet is not a series of tubes or your web browser. If you grew up in the 90s with movies like Lawnmower Man, Hackers or The Net your brain has been tainted by Hollywood's vision of internet cyberspace. We'll take you on the dime tour of the web, dispelling myths about tubes and Second Life-like virtual realities. We'll also show you that a website is just a collection of files connected to a domain name that link to each other.
We'll round out the video with a short introduction to the two most important coding languages on the web: HTML and CSS. We'll discover that HTML is used to encode all of your site's content, while CSS is the style master, controlling the visual appearance of that HTML content. Check out the example site that we built, which we’ll reference later on in the series as we explain more about HTML and CSS. In next week’s episode, we’ll dig a bit deeper into HTML!
I was tought that HTML and CSS are not exactly coding languages. Coul somebody clarify?
Hey, Sam! This is definitely a finer point. HTML & CSS are coding, but they’re not “programming”. For a more in depth description see: Programs vs. Markup
So, what is a dynamic website?
Ben, a dynamic website is one whose content is updated by a content management system (much like WordPress) rather than being hardcoded in HTML.
Funny you should ask me for both my *email* and my *website*…
Why is that funny? Because ‘email’ and ‘web’ are both different types if *internet* service – and this ‘internet primer’ is actually a *web* primer and doesn’t explain at all what the internet is beyond the one phrase ‘computers connected by wires’. (Actually it’s a network of networks of computers, and not all connections within the smaller networks need to be wires.)
Seems you’re missing a few beats here and instead of actually explaining the internet first, you’re only explaining the web (and not explaining the difference between ‘web’, ‘email’, ‘chat’ and other services on the internet). The takeaway for many will be the widely-existing confusion between ‘internet’ and ‘web’.
Great points, Marjolein. It’s true that the Internet and the web are not one and the same. For those who may be confused by hearing this, let me explain through a quick story. I was traveling in the Irish countryside one summer. My friends and I stopped at a small town inn to stay the night. The town was so small in fact that this inn was the only commercial building the town had. As such it was not only the town inn, but also the town restaurant, the town post office, the town grocery store, the town pub and the town gas station all within about 800 square feet of space. The Internet is kind of like that small town inn. Since it’s the only real network hub in the world, it provides a number of different services like E-mail, the world wide web (which we teach you about on this website), chat, Internet telephony (VOIP) and file sharing services (P2P) are the separate services all running within the Internet.
Thanks for providing the opportunity to clarify, Marjolein.
Pretentious web site, ugly font. No help.
Thanks for the feedback, Julia!