Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The Internet: The basics

For class today, we had to read the article The Internet: The basics by Jason Whitaker. I thought this was going to be a straightforward reading about the many basics of the internet, but it was very complex and a lot of the information he talked about went right over my head. Although much of the information was hard for me to understand, I was able to grasp many of the basics he did talk about and was able to gain information from this article.

Whitaker talks about the fundamental component of the World Wide Web, which is hypertext. Hypertext is the ability to link information to other information and he claims without it, the web would not exist (Whitaker, 2002). Whitaker later goes on to talk about what the core of a web page is, Hypertext Markup Language. HTML is the “basic set of commands used to format pages for display across the World Wide Web” (Whitaker, pg 74)..

Whitaker begins to talk about the elements of a web page that HTML makes possible. This includes text, color and images, the layout, and hyperlinks. All of these are important to making sure that the website is conveying the information necessary and is also not distracting or turning away any visitors. If the text is too small, the colors represent different meanings in different cultures, the layout makes it difficult for the viewer to navigate through the window, and there are no hyperlinks; the web page is not going to get the full potential of viewers the designer wants (Whitaker, 2002).

The reading goes on to talk about how there are some problems with HTML that the inventor could not foresee. This includes the separation between design and content. It states that through the use of style sheets or CSS, the cascading style sheet system, this problem can be overcome. Style sheets “provide information governing the position and styling of text and can also be created separately to HTML files and linked to them” (Whitaker, pg 77). Through this system, Whitaker says that the burden of presentation design from HTML will be removed.

When Whitaker was talking about the font and colors of a webpage, it brought back the memory of making an AOL profile circa 2000. All these codes were needed to pick the font and color people wanted, which is the same process used to make web pages. Although I did not understand a lot of what he talked about in this article, I did understand web production and new media. Apparently, the basics of the internet are not that basic to me and the internet continues to be something that boggles my mind.


Whitaker, Jason. (2002). The Internet: The Basics (chapter 3). New York: Routledge

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