Web Anatomy 101

Web Pages

Built with HTML- the HyperText Markup Language
Consist of text content, hypertext links, images, sounds, videos, VRML worlds, and more
are viewed with a Web browser such as Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer
Are individual files that reside on a Web server. Each HTML page and each accompanying picture or sound counts as a separate file that must be transferred from the server to the browser for the page to be viewed correctly.

Web Servers

a software program sitting on a computer that serves up pages and information as requested by browsers
can also be FTP servers, mail server, or DNS server at the same time it serves up Web pages

URLs -Uniform Resource Locators

5 Parts to a URL

the protocol used to retrieve the object (eg: http)
the Web server from which to retrieve the object DNS
the port on the host machine on which the Web server is running. If it is not stated, the default is 80.
the file to retrieve or the script to execute
optional script parameters, also known as the query string

For Example:
http://www.uwo.ca

http://www.uwo.ca/mit/

http://www.uwo.ca/mit/vons.html

http://www.uwo.ca:81/library/filename.html

http://www.uwo.ca/cgi/mc.exe?template=volcanoes+environment

ftp://ftp.uwo.ca/pub/program.zip

CGI- the Common Gateway Interface

The days of static Web pages are gone forever. Now scripts can be executed over the Web, increasing the interactive possibilities.
CGI is yet another standard. CGI acts as the mechanism through which you can connect your script to a Web server. It is important to note that CGI itself is not a scripting language, but rather it is a protocol that lets certain scripts work behind the scenes to add interactivity to Web pages.
Here is a good example:http://slis6000.slis.uwo.ca/~ydarnell/submit.htm
Here is a different kind:http://altavista.digital.com

Why HTML Page Structure Matters

When the search engines and their automatic indexing robots come to index your beautiful new Web-site, it pays closer attention to some HTML tags than others. Major places the search engines look at for information on your site:

META tags
the URL itself- domain name, directory names, file names
H1 and H2 tags
text toward the top of the page

If you have a lot of graphics on your site, make sure you use the ALT tag to tell the search engine what the picture says. For example, a graphic that says "Mike's Tires" is invisible as far as indexing goes to the search engine.