A Lokk Into the Web

How the Web Works

Many people think the Internet and the web are the same thing. In fact, the Internet is simply a global network of computers – the web runs on top of the Internet, and makes it useful for us. So how does the web work?

The Invention of the Web

The web was invented by a man named Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 – that's 20 years after the start of the Internet. People had been trying to work out effective ways of sending information around on the Internet for a while at that point (email was invented in 1971, for example), but there hadn't been any systems that had really harnessed the net's potential.

The web changed everything. Berners-Lee's big idea was to apply the idea of links to the Internet: the web would be a mass of pages that you could move between by clicking on links. He came up with a format for these pages (HTML), and wrote the first web browser to view them with, as well as the first web server for sending them to other people's web browsers.

Links might not seem like much now, but at the time they were revolutionary. Imagine what the web would be like if you had to keep typing long addresses every time you wanted to move from one page to the next, or using long numbered menu systems that work differently from one site to the next. Without the web, having Internet access would be pretty useless.

Servers and Browsers

Any time you use a web browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox), you're using the web. How? Well, it works like this:

1. You open your web browser, and it goes to your home page. From there, you can click links to other websites, or to other parts of the same website. If your home page is a search engine, then you can type in a search and click links in the search results. If you know the address of a site you want to go to, you can type it in, and then click more links from there to keep going.

2. Each time you click a link, your browser looks at two things about it: the name of the web server it links to, and the name of the page it links to on that server. For example, the address 'http://www.example.com/mypage.html' tells the web browser to get the page called mypage.html from the server at www.example.com, using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). This server is a real computer, connected to the Internet, that has the page you want to read stored on its hard disk.

3. To find out where this server is, your web browser looks it up using DNS (Domain Name System), which turns the text address into a number. This IP (Internet Protocol) address consists of four numbers between 0 and 255 – it looks like a phone number. The Internet is set up to make it easy to find a server anywhere in the world once you know its IP address, and it can easily find the quickest route from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) to the server, and establish communication. This whole process, from DNS lookup to connection, will often take much less than a second.

4. Your web browser then sends an HTTP request to that web server, and the web server responds by sending back the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code for that page. Your web browser turns this code into a page that you can view. From there, you can click more links to start the process over again.

Of course, all this is quite simplified: modern browsers and servers send around much more than HTML code. You can use the web to download anything now, from pictures to programs, but it all works in basically the same way.

If something goes wrong somewhere in this process, then you'll get an error: 'the page cannot be displayed', for example, usually means that the server's name was wrong, or that it doesn't have the page you wanted. You might also see errors saying that the server is currently too busy with other people's requests to respond, or that the page you wanted has moved. In each case, the best thing to do is to follow the instructions on the error page, which usually means checking the address and trying again.

Web Design Principles and Elements

All About Web Design: Principles and Elements.

A truly shocking number of web designers are unfamiliar with the basic principles and elements of design. Having never been through any formal design education, many just go with what they think 'looks good', with very mixed results. If you're going to design a website, you'll do much better if you have some idea of what you're doing when it comes to graphic design. Here, then, is a crash course in the principles and elements most useful to web designers.

Balance.

It is important for things to be balanced. That doesn't necessarily mean symmetry, making one side exactly the same as the other, but it does mean that you can't make one side 'strong' and not balance that on the other side. For example, if you use a dark colour, you should balance it with a larger area of a lighter colour. What balance allows you to do is to lead the viewer's eye to certain parts of the page without making the page look ridiculous.

Emphasis.

If you want to make part of the page stand out from all the rest, you can give it emphasis using a variety of techniques. Grouping everything together and then moving one thing a significant distance away from them will make it a focal point, as will making it a different shape from the others, or a different colour.

Line.

The directions of your lines will give a mood to your design: as a rule, horizontal lines are calmer, vertical lines are moderately active, and jagged or diagonal lines are very active. If you were designing an austere financial news site, then, you'd use horizontal lines, while a fun site for kids would be full of lines going in all sorts of directions.

Shape.

One thing that lots of people don't realise is that there are two kinds of shapes – positive and negative – and every design has both kinds of shapes. The positive ones are the ones you, the designer, actively placed on the page, while the negative shapes are the spaces created around the positive ones. Many web designers simply ignore this, leaving their negative shapes as a mess – this leads to the 'boxy' look that many amateur pages have.

Colour.

Colour is a big subject. As soon as you add more than one colour to a page, you make the other colours look different. Some colours are complementary, and some just look terrible together. On the web, though, you should usually avoid using too many colours on one page – even if they are complementary, it will look garish.

For the web, hue is more important: the best way to create a colour scheme is to use black, white, and various shades of one colour. You have to consider the brightness and intensity of your colours, to make sure you're not overdoing things. One of the easiest mistakes to make is to use the built-in CSS colour words (background-color: red, for example) instead of creating colour codes – the colour words should generally be avoided, because they're just too intense.

Space.

You can create all sorts of illusions with the amount of space you put between your objects, and where you put it: design is often as much knowing where to put something as it is knowing what to put there. If you make things overlap, or example, the covered things appear to be at the 'back' while the uncovered ones are at the 'front'.

Lots More.

This is the briefest of brief overviews, because graphic design is a surprisingly large subject, and one that's changing all the time. If you want to get properly up to speed, it's worth buying a book, or even taking an evening course at your local college – you won't regret it.