Where To From Here

Before you charge off, full of determination that the next time they see your site they'll have a different reaction, let's take a quick look at the arena you're entering. I want to do that by answering the following questions:

• What is the World-Wide Web?
• What is a web site?
• What is HTML?
• Are you trying to reach anyone in particular?

Sit back, relax, ponder with me for a moment.

What is the World-Wide Web

This is just about the most talked about subject I've ever seen. The Internet's been around for a long time (in computer years) but just really became popular after the folks at CERN invented the World-Wide Web. It became so popular that a group of organizations formed a consortium called W3C to provide a place to store all the official information about the Web, the software available, standards development and so on. You could join as well, if you're willing to fork over the money!

In spite of all the technical mumbo-jumbo you can picture the web as a way to hook your computer to all the other computers in the world. Kind of scary isn't it? Actually, the hooking is "the Internet" and "the Web" is how your computer can actually talk to all the others so they'll understand you. And vice-versa.

In the old days (pre-WWW), you shared information by sending it across a network through e-mail, ftp or some other transfer mechanism. The information then became your responsibility and you had to store it also. You could pull information from Bulletin Board systems. You could join an on-line service like Compuserve or Prodigy and see the information that they had assembled on their systems. But the amount of information, and the updating of the information, was just too great a task for any one company or system.

The methods the folks at CERN invented addressed this problem. It lets an individual (person or institution) publish and maintain information on a computer (server) somewhere. Then, through the magic of the Internet, it allows other persons to come along and view the information. Technically, you still transmit the information across the 'net and store it locally (for as long as you need it). But the ownership of the document stays with the original publisher and you can just reference the original copy whenever you need to see it again.

What really sparked the popularity of the Internet was something a little more practical though. For most individuals it was free! That's the kind of price that'll breathe life into just about anything. Not only that, if you could get a local connection to the 'net, you could get stuff from any computer in the world without having to pay telephone charges. The information that resides on BBS's could be put up as Web sites and anyone could access them without having to dial the BBS telephone number. What a deal.

What is a Web Site

Anything you want it to be! That can be good and that can be bad. If you've surfed much you'll see what I mean. I would compare a web site to a library. It contains a lot of information, pointers to more information, it's free to the reader (in most cases), and it's open to the public (in most cases - we are talking about Personal Web Pages after all).

You have at your disposal the equivalent of a "Vanity Press". You can take whatever message you want and present to the entire world. You can include any type of pictures, diagrams, maps, sounds, video clips, colors - whatever you can dream up there's probably a way to do it.

You are the author, editor and publisher! What a thrill - what a responsibility. This is your forum - it can be like the community bulletin board in the center of the mall or it can be the bathroom wall at the local bar. That's your choice - this is yours. Just one word of caution - the Internet is not anonymous. Your message will be seen by the person you least expect.

Outside of the content, a web site stores your text files and graphics that you are making available to the 'net. A program running on the computer, where your information is stored, gets requests from people on the internet to see a file. This program looks for the file, then transmits it across the 'net to the requestor. The viewer's program then decodes the information it receives based on a set of standards and displays it. Simple enough right?

What is HTML

Oh boy. If you want to start a fight, hop into the HTML authoring newsgroup and ask for a list of the HTML "commands". Or mention that you're an HTML programmer. Or ask some question about how you can control what the user sees. These and similar questions will certainly cure your need for attention - if you crave abuse, sarcasm and criticism.

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. I've never figured out the "Hyper" part unless it's because the text is supposed to be so excited! It's a language all right - it has no logic or conditional or branching capabilities so you can't do much in the way of programming. The markup part comes from the fact that you are marking up a text file so that some program reading your file will know what it should do with the text you've marked.

This was about the hardest concept I've ever had to deal with (short of the earth being round). I've done a lot of word processing in my day and always prided myself on the how "professional" my documents looked. I am a student of white space, tabs, margins, headers and footers - in short - a total control freak. It's taken me almost a year to come to terms with what HTML represents.

I had this desire, no burning need is more like it, to fuss with the petty details of how my pages looked as I did them. I wanted the fonts to be just so in relation to each other. I wanted my background colors and images to all be color coordinated. I just wanted every detail to be static and appear to the viewer exactly as I had designed it. Then I saw my page on an AOL browser. Then I saw my page on a Lynx browser. Nasty stuff!

Then everything I'd been reading sank in. The beauty of the web is that each person chooses how they want to view the information you've prepared. If your entire message is contained in pictures and the person seeing doesn't have graphic capability or has turned off graphics then your message has fallen on "deaf ears". You may want white backgrounds with black text (another sure way to have the purists ridicule you) or fancy textured backgrounds. All of this can look good for you but someone else will get a totally different view.

HTML provides a framework for you to construct a document that someone else can read. The structure is more logical than physical. You will learn to emphasize and categorize things in simple ways. You will come to grips with the fact that some of the visual tricks you use to manipulate readers just won't work in HTML. You will learn some ways around some of these as you go through my descriptions of the tags. Just don't tell anyone where you learned it or the purists will come calling on me.

Are You Trying to Reach Anyone in Particular

This is important for you to think about. Maybe not at first when all you're thinking about is putting something out there for some friends to see. But sooner or later you're going to get serious about trying to offer something of value at your site. It may be some hobby related material, you may have a better way of writing an HTML guide, it may be work related or you simply want to publish some of your poetry.

Then you have to ask yourself - do you want to make your material unavailable to certain surfers? Of course not! You want everyone to be able to benefit from your experience. This is where the real power of HTML steps in. What if someone wants to read your material but they can't see? They have software that translates text into spoken words and it understands HTML coding but it doesn't deal with red text that you wanted emphasized. If all the visual effects you put in convey a lot of your message then you've just lost that part of it. I know that sounds very boring but if you really want to get a message across then you should try to make sure that your words can stand alone.

The Rusk Family . . . "the Legend Continues"