WHAT IS A URL
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and is a string of data that points to an internet address.
Below see examples of URLs and its different parts.
A URL is a path that points to a file (an html file, a jpeg, an mov, a pdf...)
When you see that the URL ends with a folder name, it is pointing to the main page inside that folder (called the index page or index.html).
That last step (the /index.html) is usually omitted because the browser will automatically display any file called index.html or index.htm inside a given folder.
INTERNET PROTOCOL |
www. |
DOMAIN NAME |
DOMAIN EXTENSION |
FIRST LEVEL FOLDER |
|
|
|
||
http:// |
www. |
amazon |
.com |
|
http:// |
sbcc |
.edu |
||
http:// |
www. |
merriam-webster |
.com |
|
http:// |
soma.sbcc |
.edu |
/users |
|
http:// |
www. |
wikipedia |
.org |
|
http:// |
www. |
en.wikipedia |
.org |
/Main_Page |
| http://www.wikipedia.org/ | |||
|
http://soma.sbcc.edu/users/ajarabo http://soma.sbcc.edu/users/ajarabo/intro_Multimedia/introMultimedia_links.htm |
WHAT IS A DOMAIN
Your domain name is your virtual address. It is as important, if not more so, than the physical address of a business.
The domain is also a part of your brand. Once selected, it is important to provide consistency to your visitors and/or customers by remaining at your address.
A domain name (Web address) is your Internet identity and your unique online brand.
Domain Name structure
www. |
|
DOMAIN NAME |
|
DOMAIN EXTENSION |
|
www. |
|
amazon |
.com |
||
|
sbcc |
.edu |
|||
www. |
|
merriam-webster |
.com |
||
|
Domain Name Constraints
1) Domain Names must contain three (3) to sixty-three (63) characters.
This is excluding the "www." and the top-level domain or domain extension.
2) Domain Names may only contain letters (a-z), numbers (0-9) and dashes (-).
3) Domain Names may not start or end with a dash.
4) Domain Names are not case-sensitive.
Top Level or Domain Extensions
1) .com represents the word "commercial," and is the most widely used extension in the world.
Most businesses prefer a .com domain name because it is a highly recognized symbol for having a business presence on the Internet.
2) .net represents the word "network," and is most commonly used by Internet service providers, Web-hosting companies or other businesses that are directly involved in the infrastructure of the Internet. Additionally, some businesses choose domain names with a .net extension for their intranet Websites
3) .org represents the word "organization," and is primarily used by non-profits groups or trade associations.
4) .biz is used for small business Web sites.
5) .info is for credible resource Web sites and signifies a "resource" web site. It is the most popular extension beyond .com, .net and .org.
6) .us is for American Web sites and is the newest extension. It has the largest amount of available names in inventory. Other countries use as a default the domain extension of the name of their country. Examples of this are:
7) .tv is for rich content/multi-media Web sites, commonly used wit
All the files that constitute your site and will have to be uploaded to the server, should be placed inside a folder in your computer. We call that folder the root folder.
Link to more on file management.
In digital computing, hexadecimal is primarily used to represent bytes (attempts to represent the 256 possible byte values by other means have led to problems).
In html,color codes must be given as hexadecimal numbers in the form "#RRGGBB" where RR represents the intensity of red, GG the intensity of green and BB the intensity of blue.
Link to a color palette showing the hexadecimal values>HERE
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and it is the predominant markup language for web pages.
It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content.<tag>
Html text differes from other types of linear text in that hyperlinks placed in the body allow to havigate content in a non-linear and non-hierachical path (from one word on a page to a different page, or from one word/phrase on a page to a line in a different page).
Html is part of a family of mark up languages deriving from XML.
More on html structure.
We are evolving (with html4) to a Modular design structure for the web, were content, design, scripts, databases are stored in different files but applied to the website.
The literal content of a web page is contained in the html file for the page, a number of html files for a site.
The look and feel of the page gets specified in an CSS style sheet. This file stores the definition of the appearance and layout of text, boxes and other materials that compose the page.
A site can include or can load scripts in languages such as JavaScript (which affect the behavior of the HTML processors that are the Web browsers).
Server-side languages, like PHD, control processing and bussiness logic.
Data-bases, like mySQL, structure and store large amounts of content.
Some times all those different types of structures are present in a web site, sometimes a site is composed of only html and CSS working together.
Javascript is a script language (as opposed to a more robust and structured programming language) that works with the browser to enhance interfaces by implementing dynamic elements (elements that appear/dissapear over time, or move, or change with intercativity: the things that make a web page feel different from a book or a kindle page: dynamic menus, open new browser windows automatically...). HTML is static. So making your content respond to user interaction, animate or change based on other factors is usually the task of JavaScript or Server-side Scripting.
JavaScript uses syntax influenced by that of C. JavaScript copies many names and naming conventions from Java, but the two languages are otherwise unrelated and have very different semantics.
JavaScript has the advantage of being performed in the browser or what we call client-side, meaning page content does not have to be refreshed in order for changes to occur (see AJAX below).
One of the most helpful developments in adding scripting functionality of thesites has been the development of multiple JavaScript frameworks. These frameworks are JavaScript libraries that have prewritten functions and objects built into them. Although this is a great deal easier and speeds development considerably, youstill need to understand how JavaScript works, in order to integrate these frameworks successfully.
Some of the more popular frameworks are Prototype, jQuery, Mootools andAdobe's Spry framework.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML.
A Cascading Style sheet file is usually stored as an independent file and applied to all or a number of pages in a website, facilitaing the application and modifiaction of the design to websites with a lot of content, making also possible to "change the look of a site" depending on the device held for browsing (by having a different CSS file for each device and being able to detect the device/apply the adecate style sheet on each case).
A flash project is contained in a using the fla extension. On the web we see a compressed verion of the project that contains only waht is needed as a file with extension.swf
Correctly displaying a SWF file in a browser requires an HTML file. The browser loads the HTML file, and then loads the SWF file that is specified in the HTML code. It's necessary that the HTML page contains an OBJECT tag that specifies the location of the actual Adobe Flash SWF file.
ActionScript is an object-oriented language originally developed by Macromedia Inc. and now owned by Adobe Systems.
It is a dialect of ECMAScript (meaning it is a superset of the syntax and semantics of the language more widely known as JavaScript), and is used primarily for the development of websites and software targeting the Adobe Flash Player platform, used on Web pages in the form of embedded SWF files.
The current version is ActionScript 3.0 It debuted in June 2006, debuted with Adobe Flex 2.0 and its corresponding player, Flash Player 9.
ActionScript 3.0 was a fundamental restructuring of the language from its previous version (AS 2.0) and it provides a more rubust language, conformed with the current version of ECMAScript fourth edition, integration with XML documents,improved performance as a class-based inheritance system. From a data type point of view (for coding)it works with fundamental" or "simple" data types which are used to create other data types. These data types are very similar to Java data types.
AJAX is an acronism for for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a group of interrelated web development techniques used on the client-side to create asynchronous web applications. With Ajax, web applications can send data to, and retrieve data from, a server asynchronously (in the background) without interfering with the display and behavior of the existing page. Data can be retrieved using the XMLHttpRequest object.
Ajax is not a single technology, but a group of technologies. HTML and CSS can be used in combination to mark up and style information. The document as an object is accessed with JavaScript to dynamically display, and allow the user to interact with, the information presented. JavaScript and the XMLHttpRequest object provide a method for exchanging data asynchronously between browser and server to avoid full page reloads.
In the 1990s, most web sites were based on complete HTML pages. Each user action required that the page be reloaded from the server (or a new page loaded). This process was inefficient, as reflected by the user experience: all page content disappeared then reappeared. Each time a page was reloaded due to a partial change, all of the content had to be re-sent, even though only some of the information had changed. This placed additional load on the server and used excessive bandwidth.
Object oriented programming (OOP) is a way of organizing programming that allows re-use of the code (with discrete, reusable units of programming logic).
It is a collection of interactive objects (organized as modules) as opposed to a list of routines to perform (classic programming model)
Each object is capable of receiving messages, processing data, and sending messages to other objects. Objects are "instances of a class" and they inherit properties from it. Classes are well organized independent models.
Actions and methods are
closely associated to those objects.
The motivation to develop this type of programming was both to build strong structures made of simple modules and to hide data for higher security in its interaction with hardware and software. Graphical user interfaces rely heavily upon object-oriented programming techniques.Languages that heavily use this structure are Objective C and in a lesser way C++ and Java. Action Scripting 3.0 also uses this structure.
The object-oriented approach encourages the programmer to place data where it is not directly accessible by the rest of the program. Instead, the data is accessed by calling specially written functions, commonly called methods, which are either bundled in with the data or inherited from "class objects." These act as the intermediaries for retrieving or modifying the data they control.
Objects can be thought of as wrapping their data within a set of functions designed to ensure that the data are used appropriately, and to assist in that use. The object's methods will typically include checks and safeguards that are specific to the types of data the object contains.