The Open Door Web Site

Backstage Pass to Internet
course developed by: Alan Damon

The really complex stuff - things only the script writers and backstage hands know

These are the technical things which you will need to know to get your own show on the road:

  • FTP, or File Transfer Protocol is another way of hooking up to a server.  This time instead of just taking files to look at them, you can edit and save your own files onto the server.  To get in, you need two things:  your user ID ("jbond") and your password ("spy007").  We will learn more about this in Chapter 3.

  • domain names are words which have been reserved with -.com, -.fr, -.net, -.edu etc after them.  For example, "eabjm.com" has been reserved so that no one else can use it.  This is one of the rare aspects of Internet which is centralized.  You have to go through specific organizations which make sure that no two people have the same domain name in the world.  To reserve your very own domain name, it takes about 5 minutes and about $70 off your Visa card.

  • filenames and extensions are extremely important in managing a web site.  Any file, whether it be a text, a photo, an animation or a graph, has to have both a filename ("penguins") and an extension (".gif"). 

    filename.extension  - description

    My Life Story.doc

    		  - This is a Microsoft Word document.
    sycamore.jpg  - This is an image in JPEG format.
    winword.exe  - This is an application which runs in Windows..
    animation316.gif  - This is an animated image in GIF format.
    index.html  - This is a web page in HTML format.
    index.asp  - This is a web page on an active server 
  • ALT tags are commands in the HTML code which pop up in place of a picture while the image is loading.  It tells people with slow modems what is coming (ex: "Photo of penguins")  This text also pops up when the mouse is placed over the image.  Try it on the photo here.
 "I gotta be me ! ! !"

  • Fonts are the different types of characters in which you can present your text, but you knew that already.  The complex aspect of this in web-pages is that only the fonts installed in your computer can be displayed on the page. If the page was made by a Macintosh user who used Helvetica or Palatino and you are looking at it with a PC, the page will be displayed in Arial or Times New Roman.  In most cases, this poses no real problem; it's just important not to waste time looking for the perfect font because the person looking at your page might not have it.   If a page is written in Greek, however, and you do not have any Greek fonts installed on your computer, the page will come up as gobbledygook.  

  • WYSIWYG editors for web pages are programs such as Microsoft Word, Star Office, and Dream Weaver where What You See Is What You Get.  In other words, what appears on the screen is really what the page will look like so you do not have to worry about editing the HTML source code because these programs do it all for you.   You can do a lot with web pages but not everything which can be done with a word processor and it is all too easy to fall into the trap of putting things in which will not work.  It isn't until you save that certain programs such as Word say "Are you sure you want to save this as a web page?  Certain things might be lost."  And that's when half of your beautiful work disappears.

    A brief and very incomplete list of some of the things which you can do with a word processor but which do not work on web pages:
    Won't work Remedy
    Word Art which makes fancy titles Create an image in an image editor
    Vectorial drawings such as arrows pointing to things or dialog balloons on photos. Put the arrows on the original image using and image editor
    Text boxes floating over an image Put the text in the image using an image editor
    Text written vertically Make an image of the text using an image editor or find another way of presenting the text.
    Images overlapping each other to form a collage. Overlap the images in an image editor to create one big image.
    Tabs and spaces Use a table with blank cells to create empty spaces
    Highlighted text All you can do is change the color of the text or underline it
    Borders on certain cells of a table but not others It's all or nothing - either the whole table has borders around every  cell or none at all.  The only thing which can be individualized in each is the background color.

    Some of these special effects are becoming possible with the all-new and improved Dynamic HTML allowing layers to be created that are capable of moving over or under each other as backdrops.  Such fancy schmancy stuff is beyond the scope of this course.  One of the things we will learn in this course is to Keep It Simple!  Too many bells and whistles just complicate things. 

     

  • kilobytes and megabytes are the units of measure for computer information.  

    • To store one character (a number, a letter, a symbol or even a space) in a computer requires 1 byte (octet in French).  The computer sees a letter or number like this: 01100010, a series of 8 ones and zeroes.

    • To store 1000 characters requires 1000 bytes or one kilobyte (Kb). Click here to see what 1 Kb looks like.  

    • A megabyte (Mb)  is 1,000,000 bytes (or 1000 Kb) and...

    • ...a gigabyte (Gb) is 1,000,000,000 characters.  It is important to know this because in order to be quick on Internet, you've got to be lightweight.  The heavy stuff is not the text but the images which, as you may have noticed, take a long time to be displayed.  It is simply because squeezing a 900 Kb image through a telephone line is like getting an elephant through the eye of a needle.  So the trick is to get images which are as lightweight as possible 5 to 20Kb is perfect, up to 35 Kb is tolerable but above 50 Kb gets a little frustrating.
       

  • resolution is how sharp a picture is. Pixels are the little dots which make up a digital photo.  Lots of them give great resolution - a snapshot scanned at 600 dpi (dpi is 'dots per inch') will give a nice sharp picture - but will take up too much memory and will result in a painfully long wait for them to pop up on a web page.  Low resolution (72 dpi) is adequate for viewing on a computer screen.  The other factor, besides resolution, which determines how "heavy" an image file will be is the dimensions in centimeters (or in pixels).  An image file of 300 x 200 pixels is reasonable for a photo.  The penguin picture above has approximately those dimensions.  A final note on images:  be careful when you ask "How big is the image?" because people will not know whether you are referring to the dimensions in pixels or the amount of memory it takes up on the disk.
     

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