Web Features Tutorial

From the Beginning

Our starting-point is that we want to put our information on to a Web server. This will let us and our colleagues access it, not just directly on our PC, but also from a laptop in a hotel room abroad across the internet, or on another PC somewhere else in our company.

In the very simplest instance, if we have the ability to publish files on a Web server, (and most of us do, because Microsoft provide a free personal web server for Windows95 and later, and Unix or Linux users have access to Apache), then we have almost everything we need for a website, except navigation and content.

Navigation

The main characteristic of access to files via Web Browser is that we can follow hyperlinks from another page, without having to know the exact names of files. In particular, a group of pages must be linked together so that all the elements that form a single topic, such as the pages in a report, are easily navigated by clicking on embedded links.

Content

As long as the Web server and the browser we are using agree about the MIME types associated with files, these can be passed by the Web server to the browser client to tell it how to display the file content. The browser will either use built-in code (e.g. for HTML) or invoke helper applications as required, such as Adobe Acrobat reader or Microsoft Word. Examples include

• text/plain (.txt) will be processed by the browser as text
• text/html] (.htm & .html) will be processed by the browser as HTML formatting
• image/gif and image/jpeg (.gif & .jpg) will be processed by the browser as graphics images
• application/pdf (.pdf) will normally be passed to Adobe Acrobat Viewer*
• application/msword (.doc & .rtf) will normally be passed to Microsoft Word*