What is HTML (Hyper Text Mark-Up Language)?

Web sites are built using a computer language know as HTML which uses a system of tags to control page elements and links.

What is HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol)

HTML pages and the "media objects" that are linked to them (images, audio, video, Flash, AVIs etc) are transferred from servers to your computer via transfer protocols such as HTTP, or FTP, or indeed file-sharing protocols like SMB or AFS.

In general, the vast majority of web pages you will view on a computer will be in a browser window transferred by HTTP.

What is FTP (File Transfer Protocol)?

Web sites (HTML pages and their "media objects") are usually "uploaded" from a web designers computer to a server using a protocol called FTP (File Transfer Protocol) . eg Dreamweaver has tools to help you build a local web site and then connect and FTP it to your web server.

However, whilst a browsers and HTTP are the usual method for retrieving and viewing files from a web server, FTP is not the only way of "uploading" them.

HTTP upload, Webdav, frontpage, FTP and disk sharing are just some of the other ways of getting pages onto sites. Despite being the most common, FTP is the oldest and least secure way of uploading. FTP over Secure Sockets solves some of the problems with the original FTP. FTP is horrible because it exposes unencrypted passwords on the wire, which means anyone snooping the wire can watch what you do, and break into your site.

What are Local & Remote sites ?

A local site is built on the hard drive of the web designers computer. It will consist of a structure of folders, HTML pages, and "media objects" organised exactly as they will appear whenh transferred to the web hosting server.

A remote site is an exact copy (mirror image) of a local site that has been uploaded to a web server.

This definition of local and remote sites is relevant to the model of a web site builder but not to all situations. You can have networked “local” disks, and you can have a localhost http server on your own machine.

What is a homepage?

A homepage is the first HTML page that a surfer will see when they surf to a website. It will be located on the root level of the site and usually be entitled either "index.html" or "default.html".

eg. If you surf to http://www.planetoftunes.com you will automatically see the page http://www.planetoftunes.com/index.html

Media types for websites

Web sites are made from HTML pages which may contain embedded text. Text is the only element that can be embedded in an HTML file. All other "media objects" are linked to the HTML page from a "media" folder. Typical "media objects" types include ...