Web 101
This project is maintained by audreywatters
The World Wide Web -- and let me be clear, here in my world, we still capitalize "Web," regardless of what the AP Stylebook says -- was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. The Web is not the same as the Internet -- although both should be capitalized, according to Audrey at least.
Here is how Wikipedia describes the Web:
The World Wide Web (WWW) is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by URLs, interlinked by hypertext links, and can be accessed via the Internet. ...Web pages are primarily text documents formatted and annotated with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). In addition to formatted text, web pages may contain images, video, and software components that are rendered in the user's web browser as coherent pages of multimedia content. Embedded hyperlinks permit users to navigate between web pages. Multiple web pages with a common theme, a common domain name, or both, may be called a website. Website content can largely be provided by the publisher, or interactive where users contribute content or the content depends upon the user or their actions. Websites may be mostly informative, primarily for entertainment, or largely for commercial purposes.
There's a lot to unpack in that description -- in terms of vocabulary and ideology.
Although the Web, particularly when appended with "2.0," was supposed to usher in a new era of a readable, writable information space, there's a lot of vocabulary that obfuscates how the technologies that underpin the Web work. Here are a few definitions:
Hypertext: In 1963, Ted Nelson coined the term "hypertext." Hypertext, which is one of the structural features of the Web, is text displayed online in which other texts can be accessed via "hyperlinks." Project Xanadu is the name of Nelson's original hypertext project.
HTML: HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language, the standard markup language for the Web. From the Wikipedia description: "HTML allows images and other objects to be embedded and it can be used to create interactive forms. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes and other items. HTML elements are delineated by tags, written using angle brackets. Tags such as < img /> and < input /> introduce content into the page directly. Others such as < p >...< /p > surround and provide information about document text and may include other tags as sub-elements. Browsers do not display the HTML tags, but use them to interpret the content of the page."
CSS: CSS is short for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is used to set the visual style of a website or page.
HTTP: HTTP is short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. As the name suggests, this is a protocol for communication for the Web. It functions through requests and responses from clients and servers. For example, a Web browser might be the client requesting data from an application hosted on another Internet-connected computer, functioning as the server. From the Wikipedia description: "The client submits an HTTP request message to the server. The server, which provides resources such as HTML files and other content, or performs other functions on behalf of the client, returns a response message to the client. The response contains completion status information about the request and may also contain requested content in its message body."
URL: URL is short for Uniform Resource Locator. This specifies the address of a Web resource on the network and the mechanism for its retrieval. Related: URI, Uniform Resource Identifier.
IP Address: An Internet Protocol address is the numerical address assigned to each computing device connected to a computer network (e.g. to the Internet). It looks something like this: 71.16.48.66. Here's how DARPA described the Internet Protocol in 1981: "A distinction is made between names, addresses, and routes. A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how to get there. The internet protocol deals primarily with addresses." There are two versions: IPv4 and IPv6. Originally a 32-bit number, as computers and networking spread, folks predicted we'd run out of addresses, hence switching to IPv6 and a 128 bit address.
DNS: The Domain Name System is, as the phrase suggests, the naming system for computers connected to the network. It functions by mapping the names of those resources to the address where they're located. (i.e. it translates the human language version of a domain name -- facebook dot com -- into the string of numbers in an IP address.) The right to use a domain is handled by domain name registrars, which are licensed by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which in turn oversees the naming system of the Internet (deciding, for example, what the Top Level Domains are, such as .org, .com, and .wtf).
Web Hosting Service: A Web Hosting service leases space on a server, where clients can store the files and folders that power their websites.
LAMP Stack: LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Although there are other technologies that can be substituted here -- Windows, for example, instead of the Linux operating system -- this has been for a long time the open source "stack" for running a website. That is, an operating system for the server, a web server, a database management system, and a programming language.
Take the URL http://audreywatters.com/cv/, for example. The "http" portion of that URL is the communications protocol. "www.audreywatters.com" is the Web server domain name. I have registered that domain name through the registry service Hover. The files are hosted on GitHub. I use Cloudflare to protect my website (because people are meanies), so the DNS is rerouted from GitHub through Cloudflare. (This is an extra step you needn't take, hopefully.) "/cv/" is the folder path. And "index.html" is the Web page (the default "home" page).