Touch the Internet

So, go ahead? Touch the internet. What? You don't think you can?

Most people do not consider the internet as an actual physical part of our world but the truth is it's just as physical as the hands I'm using to type up this entry. The first step to understanding this concept is not confusing your browser with the internet. The internet is a lot of computers connected together in various ways. Your browser is a program like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox that you can use to browse the internet.

There are many purposes for the internet, more than just the everyday websites you visit. These include things like FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and more. The most common use however for the internet is made possible by hyper text which is used in operating the world wide web. Hyper text is text that allows us to link data to other data. Without hyper text nothing else on the world wide web could exist. Hyper text explains the use of the "HTTP" at the beginning of web addresses. HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

That's how hyper text works but creating web pages and creating hyper text is done through using HTML. HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a code that is made up of a series of tags that allows us to create, alter and tweak web pages to our liking. Knowledge of HTML is key to creating your own website or publishing your work onto the internet. The thing to remember out HTML is that it is just long lines of text and nothing more until it is translated and displayed properly.

In the past everything had to be done using HTML and typing up long series of tags to complete a webpage but today we have much better tools. An example of our development is the graphical interface we have now instead of just a text-based one before. Our browser translates HTML and displays what the tags are basically commanding the computer to take action as.

Now we have programs that have made creating the actual content easier, just like we've made viewing it much more enjoyable. One of these programs is Adobe Dreamweaver, which automatically creates code for any action you take on a certain area on the screen. Or you can directly create code and the box will display what your code is actually going to look like on a browser. Dreamweaver is the most popular program for creating websites and doing HTML related work.

We'll be using Dreamweaver for the next couple of days to create a website of our own. We can use this website to put up our Portfolios for the end of the year, but more about that later.