Necessary Terminology

Remember that a university community is often an exaggerated range of what we find in society. People have vastly different tastes and diverse backgrounds and behaviors. This characteristic of our audience means that we should try to be sensitive to potential issues that may arise in delivering electronic course materials.

Making web pages for students often means that you will have to contend with "compatibility problems." More commonly thought of as "things that cause a problem with what a viewer sees that are caused by things you don't even want to know about."

These issues come about because in our community people use a broad range of computer types (Mac, Windows, Unix), and a broad range of browsers (Internet Explorer, AOL, Netscape, Mozilla, MSN, ....). The range of combinations results in a lot of subtle differences in appearance on the viewer's screen (often referred to as the "client").

Okay, it isn't that bad for simple web pages, but it does help if try to think in a geeky way when you have a computer "issue." Computers are quite stupid, exceptionally fast, but quite stupid. They always do exactly what they are told, regardless of what the user wants them to do.

The first group of basic definitions come directly from the "NCSA (at UIUC) Beginner's Guide to HTML." (http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimer.html)
This is the group that started it all with the development of the browser Mosaic in April 1993 (ten years ago).

WWW - World Wide Web

Web - Slang for World Wide Web

SGML - Standard Generalized Markup Language--a standard for describing markup languages

DTD - Document Type Definition--this is the formal specification of a markup language, written using SGML

HTML - HyperText Markup Language--HTML is an SGML DTD

In practical terms, HTML is a collection of platform-independent styles (indicated by markup tags) that define the various components of a World Wide Web document. HTML was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva.

I would add:

Markup Language - A method of embedding formating instructions inside of "plain text" in an ASCII ("notepad style") document.

The markup is used by the browser to format the document on your screen or printer. The markup consists of "tags" that denote regions of the text for specific formating. These are analogous to the instructions that are embedded in a Word document when you select "bold" or "italics" on a region of text.

This is an example of bold, italics and red text!

In HTML this looks like:

This is an example of <span style="font-weight:
bold;">bold</span>, <span

style="font-style: italic;">italics</span> and <span

style="color: red;">red</span> text!<br>

WYSIWYG - (wiz-e-wig) "What you see is what you get." This describes any editor that displays the formated document as it will look to others. (Word is a WYSIWYG editor.)

The good news is that the software that is available will do the work of writing HTML for you. (i.e. They are WYSIWYG style.)

The bad news is that every HTML editing program that I have used that shows the formated (interpreted) display of your document as you work on it gets confused. Knowing enough to read the code and fix what is often a set of overlapping tags can be very helpful.

See the NCSA link for a tour of HTML elements. If you want to include any special characters, like Greek letters or an accented character, then you'll definitely want to browse this document.

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