The Internet as a Publishing Channel Teppo Räisänen LIIKE/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: sites Year 2004 : sites Nowadays: over 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

Web-clients What Web-clients can you name?

Web page vs. Web site A site consists of individual pages is a site, which has many pages (e.g. 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 &/ indexingbots

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)