The Internet as a Publishing Channel

Teppo RäisänenLIIKE/OAMK

Web vs. Internet Web (WWW) is one of the

Internet’s services The birth year of the Internet is

usually referred as 1978 or 1983 The Web was established in year

1990 Web is nowadays the most used of

the Internet’s services.

Web vs. Internet Can you think of any other Internet

services?

Expectations towards the Web In the beginning of the 2000s large

sums of money were invested into .com companies

The burst of the .com bubble increased suspicions towards the IT-field

There have been a lot of news about Internet scams and hoaxes

Many sites contain debatable or inaccurate information

Web 2.0, Social media During the last 10 years the things

like Web 2.0, Social media, cloud computing have raised a lot of attention We are seeing another .Com bubble Hopefully not as bad as the first one

Web Sites (1) Web a common publishing channel for

individual people businesses other kinds of organizations

Web publishing is becoming more and more common The reason is that we have more and

more web users and implementing Web pages thas become easier and cheaper

Web Sites (2)

In the early days the role of common people was to observe the contents of the Web pages

Many sites were implemented in quite amateurish fashion

Even at 1993 the dictionaries referred to WWW as ”World Weather Watch”

Web Sites (3) Nowadays Web sites are been built

for many kinds of purposes: Home pages of individual people Information about organizations E-commerce sites Virtual reality sites Download sites Social networking sites Etc.

Web Sites (4)

The amount of the sites has been growing rapidly: Year 1995: 18000 sites Year 2004 : 50 000 000 sites Nowadays: over 200 000 000 sites

Billions of individual pages

Web Sites (5)

Also the availability of the Web has been expanding globally Cheaper devices Better connectivity

WiFi (PANOulu) In New York there are homeless who

can still utilize the Internet

Client – server model

Web uses a so called client-server model Server-side consists of Web-servers Client-side is Web-browsers

Client – server model

Client – server model

Web-clients

What Web-clients can you name?

Web page vs. Web site

A site consists of individual pages www.oamk.fi/ is a site, which has many

pages (e.g. www.oamk.fi/english/ouas/) The pages of the site share

A consistent look & feel Links between them

The pages don’t have to be located in the same server (Usually they are)

Information Search (1)

Information search from the Web has become one of the basic IT-skills

With faster connections, the users are requiring faster and more accurate results

Many Web sites also include internal search functionalities

Information Search (2) Recognition of the correct

information is often problematic The Web users want to

find information quickly see the information in an organized way get help for finding more information

about the search topic Often the users don’t know exactly

what they are looking for (= surfing)

Information Search (3)

When designing a Web site, it is important to offer an overview about the contents: Header/footer texts Images

”Aesthetic minimalism” is often mentioned as a general principle of the Web design

Search engines

Often the Web users use search pages to find information AltaVista Google Yahoo

The search engines are based on the use of the bots &/ indexing

E-commerce Sites The popularity of buying over Web

has been increasing quickly The factors affecting to the

popularity are easiness of buying large amount of products available fear of getting hoaxed (credit cards,

private information) difficulties with returned products etc.

Web publishing (1) Even if Web publishing is a separate

area, it shares many rules & principles with the print publishing: use of colors fonts layouts

On the other hand, there are special requirements and restrictions (e.g. designing for the browser versions & user settings)

Web publishing (2) Nowadays implementing a Web site

is technically rather easy Implementing a site with a good

usability and interesting contents is still a challenging task

The Web sites also require updates: Contents Web addresses / links Etc.

The Representation of a Web Page (1)

Methods of viewing a page include: Computer display screen PDA device / mobile phone browser Printed on a paper

Most of the pages have been optimized for computer displays

The Representation of a Web Page (2)

The browsers of different vendors (IE, Opera, Mozilla-based) do not represent the pages in an uniform way

It is possible to make the server recognize the client requesting the page and thus optimize the contents for different kinds of environments

Accessibility (1) The users of the Web differ in

Cognitive skills Computer use experience Sensory skills Motoric skills

Accessibility has been set as one of the Web’s general requirements (Compare to the public buildings)

Accessibility (2)

Many pages include restricting content like: Plugin based functionalities (Flash, Java..) Small, non-adjustable font sizes Text contents that are difficult to

understand ’Universal accessibility’ is in practice

impossible to achieve, but it is still a worthy goal

Markup Web pages are based on the use of

a markup language (HTML) The browsers parse the markup and

present the page in a GUI view HTML is implemented by

the Web Editors (generated automatically)

Web designers (handwritten)