Like many long-time Mac geeks, I started using the Internet prior to the introduction of the World Wide Web, in my case, thanks to Adam Engst’s Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh. For the most part, early Internet applications provided a text-based way to interact on the Internet. Some of the early Internet applications were confusing to use (Gopher, for example) and have disappeared, but other tools, like clients for FTP (File Transfer Protocol), are still used.
Beginning in 1991, the Web made the Internet vastly more useful and exciting for many people. Anyone with access to a Web server could put Web pages on the Internet, and anyone with a Web browser could look at them. Unlike earlier Internet applications, the Web wasn’t just straight text—Web pages could have colors, pictures, and other visual elements.
The language of the Web is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). Created by Tim Berners-Lee as part of his original specification for the World Wide Web, HTML is a set of text instructions designed to tell a Web browser, like Safari or Firefox, where to place text, pictures, links, and other features on a Web page. (Find out more about Tim Berners-Lee at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_berners-lee.)
I was so excited by the invention of the World Wide Web and HTML, that I almost immediately downloaded the original NCSA Mosaic Web browser, visited the few sites that were available, and made my own Web site. What tool did I use to set up my original site? SimpleText. That’s right—the same tool we still use to read those ubiquitous Read Me files that seem to come with every new piece of software, although it’s now called TextEdit.
SimpleText was a good tool for developing Web sites in those days. Most sites consisted of a lot of text, hyperlinks to other sites, and had only a few graphics since most of us were using slow, dial-up modems to access the Internet. We would type the HTML into a text document and then view the more graphical result in a Web browser. Here’s a simplified example of the HTML behind a basic Web page:
<html><title>This is an example Web page</title><p><b>Welcome to my example Web page.</b><br>Pretty boring, huh? This is what the World Wide Web was like for quite a fewyears. Lots of text, a few tiny graphics, and links to other lame Web sites.</p><p><a href="http://web.mac.com/stevensande/iWeb/TCoiWeb/">A link to the example Web site for this ebook</a><hr><img src="http://www.gizmoranch.com/cover.jpg"></p></html>
When a Web browser receives the HTML shown above, it responds by showing a Web page that looks like the one in Figure 2.
The items in the HTML that are surrounded by angle brackets (such as <html>) are called tags. Once you know the meaning of a few tags, you can see how they create a formatted Web page:
<html>: The <html> tag defines the rest of the text as being readable by a Web browser. Notice that a closing tag, </html>, ends the text.
<title>: The opening and closing <title> tags create the title at the top of the Web page.
<p>: The <p> (paragraph) tag puts a paragraph break into the text. I could jazz up the text with a different font, italics, or boldfaced text, but for this example I left it plain vanilla.
<a >: The <a> (anchor) tag has an attribute—a bit of text that clarifies what the tag should do. In this case, the attribute tells it what Web page to link to.
<img>: The <img> (image) gives the path to a graphic that I want to display on the page.
For the first few years, nearly everyone typed HTML by hand, though by late 1995 simple graphical editors, such as Adobe’s PageMill (originally by Ceneca Communications), appeared on the scene. In their infancy, these WYSIWYG editors (What You See Is What You Get editors) were considered a godsend to those who didn’t want to think in HTML. On the other hand, they often generated HTML with oddities or bugs, and didn’t provide as much flexibility as handcoding the HTML did.
At first HTML had only a few tags, so it was easy to learn. But, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) began adding new features to HTML based on input from Web designers and browser developers: they wanted better graphics, beautiful and functional forms, better typography, and security. The W3C even developed CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to provide additional flexibility in Web page layout.
In the last few years, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has made it possible for readers to subscribe to blogs (also known as weblogs), which are Web sites with frequent updates, usually in the form of diaries or daily commentary. And, now podcasts and video podcasts (vodcasts) take RSS even further by letting people subscribe to audio and video feeds.
As the capabilities of the Web increased, the ease of creating good-looking and full-featured Web sites deteriorated. A professional Web designer needed expensive and difficult applications like Macromedia Dreamweaver or Adobe GoLive, or a conglomeration of special applications, and amateurs and hobbyists found it increasingly frustrating to use Web design tools. It wasn’t surprising to find a person using a low-end Web design application like Macromedia Contribute to develop basic pages; linking them to a blog created with Blogger, WordPress, or MovableType; and adding podcast RSS feed files created in Podcast Maker or Feeder.
iWeb is one of several next-generation Web development tools (RapidWeaver, http://www.realmacsoftware.com/, and Sandvox, http://www.karelia.com/sandvox/, are other examples) that bring high-end Web features into the reach of everyday users. In many ways, iWeb is similar to Apple’s Pages application (part of the iWork suite). Pages has a number of professionally designed templates for page layout, giving you a leg up on creating brochures, posters, newsletters, and so on. And, it is integrated with iPhoto so you can add a photo to a document with a simple drag-and-drop from iPhoto.
Taking the cue from Pages, iWeb’s programmers provided templates that serve as a starting point for designing a full-featured Web site. Integration with iPhoto, iMovie, iTunes, and even GarageBand extend the drag-and-drop options and let you add many types of media to enhance your Web site and enchant your visitors.
What you’ll find by the time you reach the end of this ebook is that you can use iWeb to design attractive Web sites full of photos, blogs, podcasts, and many special features without writing a line of HTML. I think you’ll also have a smile on your face when you see the results and realize you’ve spent only $79 to purchase iLife ’06, instead of hundreds or even thousands of dollars for high-end Web design tools.
Enough of the history lesson—let’s get started.