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Articles
TLAs - Give Me A Break
ISP, IAP, IPP, IIS, ASP, JSP, PHP, CSS, SQL, DNS, DSN: give
me a break!
The world of computing is easy. You just have to understand
the language. As far as getting your pages on the web is concerned,
the good news is that you only need to understand very little
of it.
The language of the Internet is riddled with TLAs - that's
short for Three Letter Acronyms. We'll talk about a
few of them here in relation to web sites.
Internet Providers
An ISP is an Internet Service Provider. It is used
as a wide-meaning term to describe any organisation that provides
services to connect you to the Internet or make your site
available on the Internet. It is far more commonly used than
the two terms it embraces: IAP and IPP. An IAP is an Internet
Access Provider, whilst an IPP is an Internet Presence
Provider. Many of the early organisations which provided
Internet services acted as both IAPs and IPPs - hence the
more global term ISP which includes both, tended to be used.
Your dial up or broadband access to the Internet is provided
by an IAP - Internet Access Provider.
People who provide the web space and related services for
housing your Internet site are the IPPs - Internet Presence
Providers. They give your site its presence on the Internet.
In addition to providing the web space, they also provide
security systems for your site. They also make it possible
for your site to be able to run programs to assist in providing
information to your web pages. A 'search' facility on a web
site is actually a program run in the Internet Presence Provider's
computer (its server) which searches the web site for the
words you selected. Similarly, a Feedback Form can kick off
a program on the server to process the information sent from
the web browser to the server. Usually Feedback Form programs
just reformat the data before saving it or forwarding it.
When you get a dial up or broadband account from your IAP
you may also be given some free web space to put web pages
onto the Internet. Usually this space has drawbacks. Generally
these come in two forms. Firstly, you web page may be run
inside another web page which has banners to advertise a sponsor's
products. Secondly, you are usually not allowed to use the
processing resources of the server which means that things
like search pages won't work. Almost certainly you won't be
able to use 'secure forms' which allow your to take credit
card information and the like over the Internet in a data-secure
way. Thus your IAP is providing IPP services but in a very
limited way. If you are using the space for personal purposes
this is often not an issue for you.
However, web space which is specifically paid for by you
and used for commercial purposes generally does not suffer
from these drawbacks. You can feel confident that your site
will work as designed and be able to be expanded as your needs
change. This is the kind of service you should be looking
for when you put a business web site on the Internet.
Web Servers
The program that gets the web pages off your IPPs server
computer is called a web server. Web servers are mostly run
on two main operating systems: Windows based (specifically
some version of Microsoft Windows Server) and UNIX type operating
systems (such as UNIX and LINUX).
Over 50% of web servers running the world wide web are UNIX
based, usually running the Apache Web Server. Unix and Linux
have a particularly enviable reputation for not crashing unexpectedly
- a frustration not spared to users of some other operating
systems. Likewise the Apache web server is known for its stability.
In the old days web sites only had numbers as their address
(e.g. 62.125.233.124). These were called IP Addresses (Internet
Protocol Addresses). Then domain names were invented (e.g.
www.mydomain.com). A way was needed to link the domain name,
which could easily be remembered, to the IP Address, which
couldn't easily be remembered. The solution was to have a
computer called a Domain Name Server (DNS) to translate from
one to the other--that's all that computer did! When you set
up a website you set the DNS so that this translation can
occur.
There is also a thing called a DSN: a Data Source Name. This
is a Microsoft term. It is a way of giving a database a name
(e.g. mydatabase). You tell the web server in which directory
the database resides using its DSN information. Then in the
database program you refer to the database by its name (mydatabase).
'So what?', you say. Well here's the clever bit: if you move
the database to a new directory you only need to change the
DSN information and don't need to change the database programs
to refer to its new location: they will still refer to it
by its name.
Web Programming
IIS (another TLA) means Internet Information Server.
It is a Microsoft product and runs only on Windows Servers.
Many large organisations running Intranets (internal Internets)
use Microsoft products for this purpose. IIS allows the server
to support Microsoft FrontPage Extensions: these are the special
programs that provide facilities such as feedback forms and
search facilities. It also allows Microsoft's SQL database
to be used, and supports Microsoft's web programming language
ASP (see later!). SQL is short for Structured Query Language
or Sequel (which was originally just a way of pronouncing
SQL). If the site you developed with Microsoft FrontPage doesn't
work when you upload it to the Internet it can be caused by
these extensions not being available on the server. This is
especially true if your web space was provided for free.
ASP means Active Server Pages. This is a Microsoft
Internet based technology which enables web pages to be designed
which are highly interactive. Information you type into a
web page as a web site visitor can be transmitted to the server
,and processing can then be done on the server such as:
- looking up information in a database to verify the information
you entered
- collecting information from a database, creating a web
page on the fly, and displaying it on your browser
- creating and processing shopping carts.
Systems such as these are known as client-server systems
and have been in commercial use since the mid 1980’s.
On UNIX and Linux systems similar functionality is provided
by JSP - Java Server Pages, and PHP (which stands for
Hypertext Pre-Processor - probably an acronym devised after
people had been down the pub - actually it stands for Personal
Home Page - the inventor of the language used it to display
his CV!). This kind of technology will play a major part in
the development of services which will be available on the
Internet. We live in exciting times.
Web Page Styling
Another TLA is CSS. This stands for Cascading Style Sheets.
These have been around for a very long time. The issue was
that although the standards existed, the different browsers
and browser versions either did not support them fully, or
they were were full of bugs in their support of them. It took
a while to get things sorted, and today no self respecting
web designer would create a web site without using them.
In the old style of web design each paragraph has to have
a font (and other things) assigned to it. So changing the
font meant that every paragraph had to be altered. This was
very time consuming. CSS allows 'tags', such as paragraphs,
to have a 'class' assigned to them. To change the font, its
colour, or size etc only requires a single change be made
to the 'class' and this cascades through the whole of the
website. Likewise, tables can be formatted a lot better than
before.
'Cascading' also allows these style rules to have an order
of precedence. What this means is that 'styles' defined in
one class can be inherited by other classes. If this sounds
complicated it is because it is: most of the time things work
the way you intended when you write a style sheet, but when
they don't it can take hours to work out why--usually the
cascading nature of style sheets is the problem (apart from
having been an idiot in the first place in how you wrote the
style rules).
Wrapping It Up
So what do you need to care about as someone who wants web
pages on the Internet?
My answer is that you need to understand the type of web
hosting you are getting i.e. make sure that your site is hosted
on commercial web space even if you have to pay for it, and
don't have the hosting providers banners prominently displayed
on your site.
If your site contains flashing banners advertising someone
else's products you need to ask yourself 'Is my site promoting
my company or is it being used to attract visitors so that
someone else's products and services can be promoted to them.'
If these flashing banners weren't important they wouldn't
be prominently displayed at the the TOP of your web page ,
they would be at the bottom. Putting it simply, if you're
not at the top of your web page it's not your web page.
Well, now you have been told a lot of things you didn't really
need to know.
So TVM for reading this far.
Oh, TVM means thanks very much.
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