The Nature of the Web

The World Wide Web permeates or lives to an extraordinary degree. However, most of us are unaware of the its technical underpinnings. In this session we explore the nature of the Web and in particular the role of HTTP protocol and the HTML standard.

We can now explore the basics of HTML and we will try to get to grips with the fundamentals of the HTML language. As you will see, its structure and format is relatively straightforward, and you will be able to understand the basics very quickly. We will be focusing on a small number of 'tags' to get started, and also on the ways in which different html files can be linked together to form a site.

HTML Elements are at the heart of the HTML specification. There are perhaps a dozen categories or elements to explore - in Lab-01 we explored elements from 5 of these categories. Here we review these and examine the role and format of each one in detail.

If we are just using just HTML elements we may properly structured page - however it will have a very plain and unattractive appearance. To introduce 'style' into a page we need another language - Cascading Style Sheets. This is a different language from HTML and is usually stored in a separate file - the stylesheet.

This language looks simple at first, but as we will see in the next few weeks, it is considerably more complex than HTML and will require a very careful approach to get right

Both HTML & CSS continue to evolve. Understanding where it is going is part and parcel of becoming a programmer. Here we look a some aspects of the history of HTML, including some major milestones in its evolution.

Fundamentals

At the heart of the layout engine in web browsers is a concept called the 'box model'. This defines a general layout structure for all HTML elements, providing a language for specifying important dimensions and relationships to other elements. Here we review this model in detail, and explore a range of simple examples.

Using an understanding of the fundamental features of the box model we can start to produce more interesting page layouts. Specifically, we can break a page down into sections and use box model properties to dimension and position these sections in a flexible manner. This will allow is to grow multi-column pages that can vary according to the size of the browser windows used to view them.

When you finish this lab you will have the knowledge to prepare your first project for this module. The briefing is here - pay close attention to the guidelines