Pocket Internet Explorer displaying the Wikipedia main page on a PDA

Opera Mini displaying the Wikipedia portal

The Mobile Web refers to the World Wide Web as accessed from mobile devices such as cell phones, PDAs, and other portable gadgets connected to a public network. Access does not require a desktop computer.

Today, many more people have access to mobile devices than a desktop computer.

However, Mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. This is partly due to the small physical size of the screens of mobile devices and partly due to the incompatibility of many mobile devices with not only computer operating systems, but also the format of much of the information available on the Internet.

Standards

The development of standards is one approach being implemented to improve the interoperability, usability, and accessibility issues surrounding mobile web usage.

The W3C Mobile Web Initiative is a new initiative set up by the W3C to develop best practices and technologies relevant to the Mobile Web. The goal of the initiative is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices more reliable and accessible. The main aim is to evolve standards of data formats from Internet providers that are tailored to the specifications of particular mobile devices. The W3C has published guidelines (Best Practices, Best Practices Checker Software Tool) for mobile content, and is actively addressing the problem of device diversity by establishing a technology to support a repository of Device Descriptions.

W3C is also developing a validating schema to assess the readiness of content for the mobile web, through its mobileOK Scheme, which will help content developers to quickly determine if their content is web-ready. The W3C guidelines and mobile OK approach have not been immune from criticism and an alternative set of guidelines has been made available. This puts the emphasis on Adaptation, which is now seen as the key process in achieving the Ubiquitous Web, when combined with a Device Description Repository. An alternative approach is to adopt a Multi-Web Practice whereby for a given theme a set of URIs for different devices are developed with each URI having content appropriate to its designated device. A bookmark for this set of URIs held in an array is known as an AGI (Array of Graphic Identifiers)

mTLD, the registry for .mobi, has released a free testing tool called the MobiReady Report to analyze the mobile readiness of website. It does a free page analysis and gives a Mobi Ready score. This report tests the mobile-readiness of the site using industry best practices & standards.

Other standards for the mobile web are being documented and explored for particular applications by interested industry groups, such as the use of the mobile web for the purpose of education and training e.g. Standards for M-Learning Project.

Development

Evolution of mobile web standards

The Mobile Web primarily utilises lightweight pages written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices.

New tools such as Macromedia's Flash Lite or Sun's J2ME enable the production of user interfaces customized for mobile devices. In any case, with the increasing movement away from website-based content towards delivery via RSS, Atom and other formats in which content is divorced from presentation, the issue of microcontent becomes less of a problem as the device rather than the content-provider is enabled to specify how the content is displayed.

Top-level Domain

The .mobi sponsored top-level domain was launched specifically for the mobile internet by a consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, and Vodafone. By forcing sites to comply with mobile web standards, .mobi ensures visitors a consistent and optimized experience on their mobile device.

Mobile Web 2.0

An example Web 2.0 technology used on the mobile web is the blog, resulting in the term moblog. Critics point to the difficulties of transferring Web 2.0 concepts such as open standards to the mobile web. On the other hand, advocates present it as a means of pushing information up onto the web in addition to bringing information down to the user.[1]

Faxing via Mobile Web

With the advancement of internet faxing, faxes are being sent online. Furthermore, they can be sent and received through Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).

Advertising on the Mobile Web

Advertisers are increasingly using the mobile Web as platform to reach consumers. A recent study by the Online Publishers Association [2] reports that about one-in-ten mobile Web users said they have made a purchase based on a mobile Web ad, while 23% said they have visited a Web site, 13% said they have requested more information about a product or service and 11% said they have gone to a store to check out a product.

References

• First Author, Mobilizing Scholars: using mobile devices in scientific research, May 2006.
• Jo Rabin, mTLD Mobile Top Level Domain (dotMobi), Mobile Web Best Practices, 2 November 2006
• Hoschka, Philipp, The W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), W3C, 2005.
• Passani, Luca, Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, October 2006.
• Jaokar, Ajit, Mobile web 2.0: Web 2.0 and its impact on mobility and digital convergence, December 25 2005.
• Low, Leonard & O'Connell, Margaret, Learner-Centric Design of Digital Mobile Learning, Queensland University of Technology, 2006.
• De Waele, Rudy, About context and the mobile web, March 15, 2006.
• De Waele, Rudy, Understanding Mobile 2.0, December 11, 2006

This article was originally created and edited using the Web on mobile devices.

Links

• Use of mobile web tools for education
• Ajit Jaokar and Tony Fish "Mobile Web 2.0" Future Text (2006)
• Alternative Mobile Web 2.0 access provider
• Mobile Web Americas Show
• Online Publishers Association Mobile Web Research
• Advice for mobile Web design by Cameron Moll

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A web developer is a software developer or software engineer who is specifically engaged in the development of World Wide Web applications, or distributed network applications that are run over the HTTP protocol using an HTTP server, a web server, and an HTTP client, a web browser. Web developers can be webmasters who handle website administration and web design as well as web application development or can simply be web application developers. Web developers are formally in charge of web development within their respective organizations or also as freelance software developers.

Tools of the trade

As software developers for the Web, web developers use:

• Interpreted scripting languages like Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, VBScript, JScript, etc. as well as some compiled languages like Java,C,C++,C#,VB.Net that are either pre-compiled or just-in-time compiled to create dynamic and interactive server-side web applications.

• Client-side interpreted scripting languages such as JavaScript (also called ECMAScript), HTML markup, Cascading Style Sheets, and the web browser DOM, to build client-side web applications. Client-side Web Development can also include the utilisation of so-called Rich Client technologies such as Flash, Java, Curl, XUL or others to assemble web applications that in behaviour and function more closely resemble classic desktop applications.

• Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS) like MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle database, PostgreSQL, etc. as well as the self-describing markup language XML (Extensible Markup Language), to handle data collection from web users as well as storing either public or private data that is shared over networks via the Web.

Setting a standard

Web developers are the gatekeepers of the Web. They are supposed to adhere to the open standards and guidelines created by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) when creating any programming for the web. Often, web developers help contribute to these open standards and guidelines through their work on open source projects working to help enhance and debug web-based technologies.

However, because of the fairly low barrier to entry -- freely available development environments (web server environments and development languages), freely available tutorials and information on how to do web development -- more often than not, novice Web Developers do not "adhere to the open standards and guidelines". Additionally, poorly designed or proprietary software tools that don't follow the "open standards and guidelines" create ad hoc and de facto standards which, unfortunately must be followed in order to "make things work". This was especially true during the "Browser Wars" of the 1990s. It is becoming less true as more and better tools enter the marketplace.

Common Misconceptions

As is often misunderstood by the layperson, a Web Developer does not always create graphics, logos, or identity, or create written, video, or audio content for a website, however some do. Web Designers, Web Copy Editors and Web Content Creators are different from Web Developers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A web directory or link directory is a directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking to other web sites and categorizing those links.

A web directory is not a search engine, and does not display lists of web pages based on keywords, instead it lists web sites by category and subcategory. The categorization is usually based on the whole web site, rather than one page or a set of keywords, and sites are often limited to inclusion in only one or two categories. Web directories often allow site owners to directly submit their site for inclusion, and have editors review submissions for fitness.

RSS directories are similar to web directories, but contain collections of RSS feeds, instead of links to web sites.

General

Some directories are very general in scope and list websites across a wide range of categories, regions and languages. But there are also a large number of niche directories, which focus on restricted regions, single languages, or specialist sectors.

Examples of well known, general, web directories are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project (ODP). ODP is significant due to its extensive categorization and large number of listings and its free availability for use by other directories and search engines (many sites violate its terms of use by using its content without acknowledgement).

A debate over the quality of directories and databases continues, as search engines use ODP's content without real integration, and some experiment using clustering. There have been many attempts to make directory development easier, whether using a "links for all" type link submission site using a script, or any number of available PHP portals and programs. Recently, social software techniques have spawned new efforts of categorization, with Amazon.com adding tagging to their product pages.

Directories have various types of listings, often dependent upon the price paid for inclusion:

• Free Submission - there is no charge for review of the site
• Reciprocal Link - the site submitted must link back to the directory in order to be listed
• Paid Submissions - a fee is charged for reviewing the submitted link

• No Follow - there is a rel="nofollow" attribute associated with the link, meaning search engines will not follow the link.
• Featured Link - the link is given a premium position in the category where it is submitted
• Featured Homepage Link - the link may be listed on the homepage of the directory.
• Bid for Position - a recent innovation (2007) where sites are ordered based on bids

Human-edited directories

A human-edited directory is created and maintained by editors who add links based on the policies particular to that directory.

Human-edited directories are often targeted by SEOs on the basis that links from reputable sources will improve rankings in the major search engines. Some directories may prevent search engines from rating a displayed link by using redirects, nofollow attributes, or other techniques.

Many human-edited directories, including the Open Directory Project and the World Wide Web Virtual Library, are edited by volunteers, who are often experts in particular categories. These directories are sometimes criticized due to long delays in approving submissions, or for rigid organizational structures and disputes among volunteer editors.

In response to these criticisms, some volunteer-edited directories have adopted wiki technology, to allow broader community participation in editing the directory (at the risk of introducing lower-quality, less objective entries).

Another direction taken by some web directories is the paid for inclusion model. This method enables the directory to offer timely inclusion for submissions and generally fewer listings as a result of the paid model. They often offer additional listing options to further enhance listings, including features listings and additional links to inner pages of the listed web site. These options typically have an additional fee associated, but offer significant help and visibility to sites and/or their inside pages.

Today submission of websites to web directories is considered as a common SEO (search engine optimization) technique to get vital back-links for the submitted web site. One distinctive feature of 'directory submission' is that it can not be fully automated like search engine submissions. Manual directory submission is a tedious and time consuming job and is often outsourced by the webmasters.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The World Wide Web has become a major delivery platform for a variety of complex and sophisticated enterprise applications in several domains. In addition to their inherent multifaceted functionality, these Web applications exhibit complex behavior and place some unique demands on their usability, performance, security and ability to grow and evolve.

However, a vast majority of these applications continue to be developed in an ad-hoc way, contributing to problems of usability, maintainability, quality and reliability. While Web development can benefit from established practices from other related disciplines, it has certain distinguishing characteristics that demand special considerations. In the recent years, there have been some developments towards addressing these problems and requirements. As an emerging discipline, Web engineering actively promotes systematic, disciplined and quantifiable approaches towards successful development of high-quality, ubiquitously usable Web-based systems and applications.

In particular, Web engineering focuses on the methodologies, techniques and tools that are the foundation of Web application development and which support their design, development, evolution, and evaluation. Web application development has certain characteristics that make it different from traditional software, information system, or computer application development.

Web engineering is multidisciplinary and encompasses contributions from diverse areas: systems analysis and design, software engineering, hypermedia/hypertext engineering, requirements engineering, human-computer interaction, user interface, information engineering, information indexing and retrieval, testing, modelling and simulation, project management, and graphic design and presentation.

Web engineering is neither a clone, nor a subset of software engineering, although both involve programming and software development. While Web Engineering uses software engineering principles, it encompasses new approaches, methodologies, tools, techniques, and guidelines to meet the unique requirements of Web-based applications.

For an introduction to Web engineering, see "Web Engineering: Introduction and Perspectives" by San Murugesan and Athula Ginige, Chapter 1 in "Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques" (Suh, W. ed.), Idea Group Publishing, 2005. http://www.idea-group.com/downloads/excerpts/01%20Suh.pdf

Web engineering as a discipline

Proponents of web engineering supported the establishment of web engineering as a discipline at an early stage of web. First Workshop on Web Engineering was held in conjunction with World Wide Web Conference held in Brisbane, Australia, in 1998. San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande, Steve Hansen and Athula Ginige, from University of Western Sydney, Australia formally promoted web engineering a new discipline in the first ICSE workshop on Web Engineering in 1999. Since then they published a serial of papers in a number of journals, conferences and magazines to promote their view and got wide support. Major arguments for web engineering as a new discipline are:

• WIS (Web Information System) and WIS development process are different and unique.
• Web engineering is multi-disciplinary; no single discipline (such as software engineering) can provide complete theory basis, body of knowledge and practices to guide WIS development.
• Issues of evolution and lifecycle management when compared to more 'traditional' applications.
• Web based information systems and applications are pervasive and non-trivial. The prospect of web as a platform will continue to grow and it is worth being treated specifically.

However, it has been controversial, especially for people in other traditional disciplines such as software engineering, to recognize web engineering as a new field. The issue is how different and independent web engineering is, compared with other disciplines.

Main topics of Web engineering include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Web Process & Project Management Disciplines

• Development Process and Process Improvement of Web Applications
• Web Project Management and Risk Management
• Collaborative Web Development

Web Requirements Modeling Disciplines

• Business Processes for Applications on the Web
• Process Modelling of Web applications
• Requirements Engineering for Web applications

Web System Design Disciplines, Tools & Methods

• UML and the Web
• Conceptual Modeling of Web Applications (aka. Web modeling)
• Prototyping Methods and Tools
• Web design methods
• CASE Tools for Web Applications
• Web Interface Design
• Data Models for Web Information Systems

Web System Implementation Disciplines

• Integrated Web Application Development Environments
• Code Generation for Web Applications
• Software Factories for/on the Web
• Web 2.0, AJAX, E4X and Other New Developments
• Web Services Development and Deployment
• Empirical Web Engineering

Web System Testing Disciplines

• Testing and Evaluation of Web systems and Applications
• Testing Automation, Methods and Tools for Web Applications

Web Applications Categories Disciplines

• Semantic Web applications
• Ubiquitous and Mobile Web Applications
• Mobile Web Application Development
• Device Independent Web Delivery
• Localization and Internalization Of Web Applications

Web Quality Attributes Disciplines

• Web Metrics, Cost Estimation, and Measurement
• Personalisation and Adaptation of Web applications
• Web Quality
• Usability of Web Applications
• Web accessibility
• Performance of Web-based applications

Content-related Disciplines

• Web Content Management
• Multimedia Authoring Tools and Software

Web Engineering Education

References

1. San Murugesan, Yogesh Deshpande, Steve Hansen and Athula Ginige, "Web Engineering: A New Discipline for Development of Web_based Systems," Proceedings of the First International Conference of Software Engineering (ICSE) Workshop on Web Engineering, Los Angeles, USA, 1999. Also published in Web Engineering: Managing Diversity and Complexity of Web Application Development, San Murugesan and Yogesh Deshpande (Eds), LNCS 2016, Springer Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, 2001.

2. Athula Ginige and San Murugesan, "Web Engineering: An Introduction," IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2001, pp 14-18.

3. Roger S Pressman, "Can Internet Applications be Engineered?" IEEE Software, Vol. 15, No. 5, Sep/Oct 1998, pp 104-110.

4. Roger S Pressman, "What a Tangled Web we Weave," IEEE Software, Jan/Feb 2001, Vol. 18, No.1, pp 18-21.

5. Yogesh Deshpande, and Steve Hansen, "Web Engineering: Creating Discipline among Disciplines," IEEE Multimedia, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2001, pp 81-86.

6. Robert L Glass, "Who's Right in the Web Development Debate?" Cutter IT Journal, July 2001, Vol. 14, No.7, pp 6-10.

7. Gerti Kappel, Birgit Proll, Seiegfried, and Werner Retschitzegger, "An Introduction to Web Engineering," in Web Engineering, Gerti Kappel, et al (eds.) John Wiley and Sons, Heidelberg, Germany, 2003.

Web Engineering Resources

Organizations

• Web Engineering Community: http://www.webengineering.org
• WISE Society: http://www.wisesociety.org/
• ACM SIGWEB: http://www.acm.org/sigweb
• World Wide Web Consortium: http://www.w3.org

Books

• "Web Engineering - The Discipline of Systematic Development of Web Applications", edited by Gerti Kappel, Birgit Pröll, Siegfried Reich, and Werner Retschitzegger, John Wiley & Sons, 2006
• "Web Engineering", edited by Emilia Mendes and Nile Mosley, Springer-Verlag, 2005
• "Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques", edited by Woojong Suh, Idea Group Publishing, 2005
• "Building Web Applications with UML" (2nd edition), by Jim Conallen, Pearson Education, 2003
• "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" (2nd edition), by Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfeld, O'Reilly, 2002
• "Web Site Engineering: Beyond Web Page Design", by Thomas A. Powell, David L. Jones and Dominique C. Cutts, Prentice Hall, 1998

Conferences

• World Wide Web Conference (by IW3C2, since 1994): http://www.iw3c2.org
• International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE) (since 2000)
  • 2007: http://www.icwe2007.org/
  • 2006: http://www.icwe2006.org
  • 2005: http://www.icwe2005.org
  • 2004: http://www.icwe2004.org
• ICWE Conference Proceedings
  • ICWE2005: LNCS 3579 http://www.springer.com/east/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=5-40109-22-58872076-0
  • ICWE2004: LNCS Vol. 3140 http://www.springer.com/east/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=5-40109-22-32445543-0
  • ICWE2003: LNCS Vol. 2722 http://www.springer.com/east/home/generic/search/results?SGWID=5-40109-22-3092664-0
• Web Information Systems Engineering Conference (by WISE Society, since 2000): http://www.wisesociety.org/
• International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WebIST) (since 2005): http://www.webist.org/
• International Workshop on Web Site Evolution (WSE): http://www.websiteevolution.org/
• International Conference on Software Engineering: http://www.icse-conferences.org/

Book Chapters and Articles

• Murugesan,S and A.Ginige, A. "Web Engineering: Introduction and Perspectives", Chapter 1 in "Web Engineering: Principles and Techniques" (Suh, W. ed.), Idea Group Publishing, 2005. http://www.idea-group.com/downloads/excerpts/01%20Suh.pdf
• Pressman, R.S., 'Applying Web Engineering', Part 3, Chapters 16-20, in Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Perspective, Sixth Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, 2004. http://www.rspa.com/

Journals

• Journal of Web Engineering: http://www.rintonpress.com/journals/jwe/
• International Journal of Web Engineering and Technology: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=48
• ACM Transactions on Internet Technology: http://www.acm.org/pubs/periodicals/toit/
• World Wide Web (Kluwer Academic Publishers): http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1386-145X

Special issues

• Web Engineering, IEEE MultiMedia, Jan.–Mar. 2001 (Part 1) and April–June 2001 (Part 2). http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLPublication.jsp?pubtype=m&acronym=mu
• Usability Engineering, IEEE Software, January-February 2001.
• Web Engineering, Cutter IT Journal, 14(7), July 2001.*
• Testing E-business Applications, Cutter IT Journal, September 2001.
• Engineering Internet Software, IEEE Software, March-April 2002.
• Usability and the Web, IEEE Internet Computing, March-April 2002.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The Webby Awards
Webby Awards logo
Awarded for	Excellence in websites
Presented by	International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences
First awarded	1994 (original version) 1996 (current incarnation)
Official website

Presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, The Webby Awards are a set of awards presented to the "world's best websites". The awards have been given out since 1996. There is also a second set of awards called the People's Voice Awards for the same categories which are given by popular vote.[1]

History

The first Webby Awards [2] were given out from 1994 to 1996 by the World Wide Web Organization [3], an organization that was dedicated to the promotion of the Web. It was largely decommissioned sometime after July, 1997. The organization was chiefly sponsored by WebMagic, the Internet business developer that has built many well known online businesses, including Toys.com (which became part of eToys), and Pets.com. Additional sponsorship was provided by Cisco Systems and ADC Telecommunications.

The second, and current, Webby Awards were founded in 1996 by Tiffany Shlain, and sponsored by The Web magazine. When The Web ceased to exist in 1998, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) was formed to take over. [4]

The organizations that created the first and second Webby Awards were not related to one another. It is not known if Tiffany Shlain was inspired by the first Webby Awards or if she came up with the concept independently.

Awards granted

The Webby Awards and The People's Voice Awards have been awarded each spring (since 1996), and The Webby Business Awards and Honorable Mentions each fall (since 2003). [5]

The Webby Awards require a $250 fee from all websites which they nominate, which some blogs see as an unnecessary burden. [6]

The Webby Awards categories

In each category, two awards are handed out: a Webby Award selected by a panel of judges, and a People's Voice Award selected by the votes of visitors to the The Webby Awards site.

• Activism: Sites facilitating political change, social movement, rights, public education, or revolution.
• Best Practices: Sites demonstrating unparalleled excellence in six areas:

1. Content
2. Structure & Navigation
3. Visual Design
4. Interactivity
5. Functionality
6. Overall Experience

• Broadband: Sites fully integrating bandwidth-intensive interactive content.
• Commerce: Sites dedicated to selling goods and products online, or using a 'particularly innovative' take on e-commerce.
• Community: Sites creating/facilitating online community, connectedness and communication around shared interests.
• Education: Sites promoting education or providing learning materials, for children or adults.
• Fashion: Sites dedicated to personal style, clothing, design, and accessories.
• Film: Sites dedicated to preservation, celebration and presentation of film and film culture.
• Finance: Sites providing financial services and/or information.
• Games: Sites dedicated to (the culture of) computer gaming.
• Government & Law: Sites dedicated to legal and government matters.
• Health: Sites dedicated to improving personal health and well-being.
• Humor: Sites dedicated to comedy or the art of laughter.
• Kids: Sites created for "the under-18 set".
• Lifetime Achievement: An honorary award granted to individuals who have been integral to the growth of the Web.
• Living: Sites providing information and resources that allow people to live on their own terms.
• Music: Sites dedicated to the distribution and presentation of music or its culture.
• NetArt: Sites that integrate art and technology, exploring and expanding the distinctive capacity of the medium.
• News: Sites dedicated to announcing and tracking recent goings-on.
• Personal Web Site: Sites created by an individual about themselves, or sites dedicated to an individual.
• Politics: Sites providing political information.
• Print & Zines: Sites dedicated to the written word, including online versions of print publications.
• Radio: Sites with ties to a radio network, station, or program.
• Rising Star: Given to the site with the greatest percent increase in visitors from April to May of the year in question, according to Nielsen//NetRatings data. Sites must meet a minimum cutoff of 500K unique visitors for April and May to be considered.
• Science: Sites dedicated to scientific exploration and news.
• Services: Sites that enable real world activities online.
• Spirituality: Sites dedicated to the spirit or the soul, or on any Divine power.
• Sports: Sites dedicated to athletics.
• Technical Achievement: Sites implementing technology that pushes the envelope, inviting visitors to believe in what once seemed impossible.
• Top Global Properties (Top U.S. Properties): Given to the site that draws the most visitors in the 14 countries that Nielsen//NetRatings measure (the U.S.).
• Travel: Sites dedicated to travel services and information.
• TV: Sites which are online counterparts of television programs or networks.
• Weird: Sites so forward thinking they seem strange when viewed without the future in mind.
• Youth: (see Kids)

The Webby Business Awards categories

• Automotive
• Creative Services
• Financial Services
• Food & Beverage
• "Good Deeds"
• Healthcare/Pharmaceuticals
• Information Technology
• Media/Entertainment
• Marketing & Communications
• Professional Services
• Retail
• Technical Services
• Telecommunications
• Travel/Tourism

Honorable Mention Categories

• Branding & Design
• Cost-Cutting/Operational Efficiency
• Customer Relationship Management/Customer Loyalty & Retention
• Integration of Online/Offline Experience
• Product Customization/Personalization
• Sales Lead Generation/Increased Sales

Acceptance Speeches

The Webbys are famous for limiting recipients to five word speeches, which are often humorous. For example, in 2006 Cute Overload's was "not bad for posting kittens" and TripAdvisor's was "because some hotels really suck". At the 2007 awards, David Bowie's speech was "I only get five words? Shit, that was five. Four more there. That's three. Two."[7]

• 2007 Acceptance Speeches

Criticism

San Francisco blog SFist has charged that the Webby Awards are essentially a Who's Who scam, as they require a "processing fee" be paid for award consideration.[8]

Links

• The Webby Awards (Official Website)
• Current Webby Award Winners
• Previous Webby Award Winners
• Usual Suspects Dominate Webbys - Wired News
• NPR's Lost & Found Sound Web Site Wins Webby Award - NPR
• Webby Awards Salute Online Originality - Washington Post

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the W3. As of March 2007, the W3C had 441 members. It is always open for new organizations to join.

W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

The Consortium is headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the primary author of the original URL (Uniform Resource Locator), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language) specifications, the principal technologies that form the basis of the World Wide Web.

History

In October 1994, Tim Berners-Lee left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- which had pioneered the Internet -- and the European Commission.

The consortium was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.

It was originally intended that CERN host the European branch of W3C. However, CERN wished to focus on particle physics, not information technology. In April 1995 the Institut national de recherche en informatique et en automatique (INRIA) became the European host of W3C, with Keio University becoming the Japanese branch in September 1996. Starting in 1997, W3C created regional offices around the world; as of May 2006 it has sixteen World Offices covering Australia, the Benelux countries (the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and Belgium), Mainland China, Finland, Germany and Austria, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Korea, Morocco, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

In January 2003, the European host was transferred from INRIA to the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), an organization that represents European national computer science laboratories.

Recommendations and certifications

In accord with the W3C Process Document, a Recommendation progresses through five maturity levels:

1. Working Draft (WD)
2. Last Call Working Draft
3. Candidate Recommendation (CR)
4. Proposed Recommendation (PR)
5. W3C Recommendation (REC)

A Recommendation may be updated by separately published Errata until enough substantial edits accumulate, at which time a new edition of the Recommendation may be produced (e.g., XML is now in its fourth edition). W3C also publishes various kinds of informative Notes which are not intended to be treated as standards.

The Consortium leaves it up to manufacturers to follow the Recommendations. Many of its standards define levels of conformance, which the developers must follow if they wish to label their product W3C-compliant. Like any standards of other organizations, W3C recommendations are sometimes implemented partially. The Recommendations are under a royalty-free patent license, allowing anyone to implement them.

Unlike the ISOC and other international standards bodies, the W3C does not have a certification program. A certification program is a process which has benefits and drawbacks; the W3C has decided, for now, that it is not suitable to start such a program owing to the risk of creating more drawbacks for the community than benefits.

Administration

The Consortium is jointly administered by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in the USA, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM) (in Sophia Antipolis, France), and Keio University (in Japan). The W3C also has World Offices in fifteen regions around the world. The W3C Offices work with their regional Web communities to promote W3C technologies in local languages, broaden W3C's geographical base, and encourage international participation in W3C Activities.

Standards

W3C/IETF Standards (over Internet protocol suite):     

Links

• W3C homepage (with links to local Offices, and many others)
• W3C Technical Reports and Publications
• W3C Sites
• The Web Standards Project
• Web Accessibility
• Home- W3Schools Guide on learning W3C standards
• W3C Markup Validation Service

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Document Update Markup Language (DUML) is an XML specification created by Brian Kardell to enable server-side logic DOM manipulation outside the context of conventional JavaScript functions.

DUML supports a simpler approach to AJAX. With most current approaches, DOM manipulation is accomplished through arbitrarily complex client-side JavaScript. With the DUML approach, the browser makes a standard AJAX call to the server. Then DOM manipulation instructions (such as appending nodes, replacing nodes, etc.) are generated server-side as a DUML document, delivered to the browser, and finally interpreted by a simple DUML interpreter running on the web page.

This diagram illustrates the interaction between the web browser and the web application, and the role that DUML plays.

The net effect is to move complex DOM manipulation logic out of the web page (and out of any associated JavaScript files) and onto the server. This may be desirable in cases where a development team wishes to put this sort of logic in the hands of the software developers rather than having the web designers handle this.

DUML itself is very simple, supporting a set of nine manipulations: appendChild, insertBefore, insertAfter, replace, remove. replaceContent, set-attribute, executeScript and queueScript. Since instructions map more or less directly to universally supported methods, the interpreter is correspondingly simple.

The DUML specification itself is generic and not tied directly to HTML based applications and therefore can be used with any XML/DOM based user interface language as long as the client supports a language in which an interpreter can be implemented.

History

The name "DUML" originated with Kardell's son, who remarked that writing DOM manipulation code using complicated client-side JavaScript was "dumb".

Links

• Official DUML Web Site

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

A JavaScript library is a library of pre-written JavaScript controls which allow for easier development of JavaScript-based applications, especially for AJAX and other web-centric technologies.

While JavaScript, as first developed by Netscape (and later Mozilla), has long had a presence on the Web for many websites, it gained a particular pitch with the rise of the Web 2.0 era of computing, in which JavaScript, combined with multiple flavors of XML, became increasingly used for the development of user interfaces for applications, both web-based and desktop-based. JavaScript was also combined with CSS to create Dynamic web pages, which have also become popular as a more accessible alternative to Flash -based websites.

With the expanded demands for JavaScript, an easier means for programmers to develop such dynamic interfaces was needed. Thus, JavaScript libraries such as JQuery and Dojo Toolkit were developed, allowing for developers to concentrate more upon more distinctive applications of AJAX. This has led to other companies and groups, such as Microsoft and Yahoo! developing their own JavaScript-based user interface libraries, which find their way into the web applications developed by these companies.

Almost all JavaScript libraries are released under either a copycenter or copyleft license to ensure license-free distribution, usage, and modification.

Furthermore, some JavaScript libraries allow for easier ties between JavaScript and other languages, such as CSS, PHP, and Java. This is to ensure that JavaScript applications will be able to run seamlessly with other, lower-level languages.

Links

• JavaScript homepage at Mozilla site

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Best Practices in Javascript Library Design

Reverse Ajax, not unlike DHTML, LAMP, Ajax and SPA, is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. These technologies include:

• Ajax for handling the data on the client side in a smooth and interactive way, and passing data between server and client.
• A technology for pushing server data to a browser
  • Comet, a connection between a server and client is kept open, by slowly loading a page in a hidden frame.
  • Piggyback, extra data is added (piggybacked) onto a normal client-server interaction.
  • Polling, the client repetitively queries (poll) the server.

Reverse Ajax is different from Ajax, as Reverse Ajax is a suite of technologies for pushing data from a server to a client. These technologies are built upon an Ajax framework.

Notes

The Polling technique is not properly a Reverse Ajax solution, because in this case the server simply responds to a repeated direct ajax request. The result is the same that Reverse Ajax, but this technique is not too elegant to be used because it makes a lot of unnecessary traffic.

Let's take a simple example:

The broadcast message.

We have 2 clients and 1 server: client1 needs to send "hello" to all the other clients

With Polling:

• client1 sends the message "hello"
• server receives the message "hello"
• client2 polls the server
• client2 receives the message "hello"
• client1 polls the server <-- unnecessary traffic starts
• client1 receives the message "hello"
• client2 polls the server
• client2 receives the message "hello" <-- unnecessary traffic continues

and these last lines repeat forever.

With Comet:

• client1 sends the message "hello"
• server receives the message "hello"
• server sends the message "hello" to all clients

no unnecessary traffic.

With PiggyBack:

• client1 sends the message "hello"
• server receives the message "hello"
• client2 does any request to the server
• server adds to the response the message "hello"

Links

Articles

• Reverse Ajax
• Exploring Reverse Ajax
• Beyond Ajax
• Changing the Web Paradigm
• Comet Low Latency Data for the Browser

Implementations

• DWR Project homepage
• Full-duplex Ajax A module for Lighttpd web server
• RJAX A Java Open Source solution using an applet and a server embedded in the web application

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Smart Client is a new "buzzword" used in software development, generally referring to applications which:

• are delivered over the web
• do not require installation (or provide automated installation and updates)
• automatically update without user action
• have the look and feel of desktop applications

The term "Smart Client" is meant to refer to simultaneously capturing the benefits of a "thin client" (zero-install, auto-update) and a "fat client" (high performance, high productivity).

A "Smart Client" application can be created in several very different technologies. The original use of the term in the context of the web was Isomorphic Software's SmartClient product (they own the SmartClient.com domain), which uses an Ajax-based, cross-browser cross-platform approach. Subsequently Microsoft began using the terminology to refer to .NET applications delivered via the Internet Explorer browser to Windows XP. The terms "Rich Internet Application" (RIA) and "rich web application" are essentially synonymous with "Smart Client", and are used to refer to several other technological approaches including Flash, Java applets and Webstart applications.

The Smart Client approach came about because when businesses tried to develop web applications to replace their old desktop applications, user productivity decreased. This was because web-based user interfaces based on server-side HTML generation are typically not as responsive, have fewer hot keys and require more use of the mouse, etc.

Smart Client applications bridge the gap between web applications and desktop applications. They provide the benefits of a web application (such as leveraging the internet and offering remote access to data) while still providing the snappy look and feel inherent to desktop applications.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are part of a series of Web accessibility guidelines published by the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative. They consist of a set of guidelines on making content accessible, primarily for disabled users, but also for all user agents, including highly limited devices, such as mobile phones.

Priority levels

The guidelines have three priority levels:

• Priority 1: Web developers must satisfy these requirements, otherwise it will be impossible for one or more groups to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as "A".
• Priority 2: Web developers should satisfy these requirements, otherwise some groups will find it difficult to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as "AA" or "double A".
• Priority 3: Web developers may satisfy these requirements, in order to make it easier for some groups to access the Web content. Conformance to this level is described as "AAA" or "triple A".

WCAG 1.0

The WCAG 1.0 were published and became a W3C recommendation on May 5, 1999.

WCAG 2.0

The first working draft of what will become the WCAG 2.0 W3C Recommendation was published on January 25, 2001, the latest version on May 17, 2007. The five year process encouraged participation in editing (and responding to the hundreds of comments) by the Working Group, with diversity assured by inclusion of accessibility experts and members of the disability community.

There has been some criticism^[1] depicting WCAG 2.0 as obscure, vague, and perhaps even a backwards step for Web accessibility, as well as criticism of the criticism.^[2]

References

Links

• WCAG 1.0
• WCAG 2.0

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: WCAG 2.0 Theme Song Web Content Accessibility Guidelines - Disability

A Web site is a collection of information about a particular topic or subject. Designing a website is defined as the arrangement and creation of Web pages that in turn make up a website. A Web page consists of information for which the Web site is developed. A website might be compared to a book, where each page of the book is a web page.

There are many aspects (design concerns) in this process, and due to the rapid development of the Internet, new aspects may emerge. For typical commercial Web sites, the basic aspects of design are:

• The content: The substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with.
• The usability: The site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable.
• The appearance: The graphics and text should include a single style that flows throughout, to show consistency. The style should be professional, appealing and relevant.
• The visibility: The site must also be easy to find via most, if not all, major search engines and advertisement media.

A Web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a website is known as the Home page or Index. Some websites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language/region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a Web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each Web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial websites are concerned.

Once a Web site is completed, it must be published or uploaded in order to be viewable to the public over the internet. This may be done using an FTP client. Once published, the Web master may use a variety of techniques to increase the traffic, or hits, that the website receives. This may include submitting the Web site to a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, exchanging links with other Web sites, creating affiliations with similar Web sites, etc.

Multidisciplinary requirements

Web site design crosses multiple disciplines of information systems, information technology and communication design. The website is an information system whose components are sometimes classified as front-end and back-end. The observable content (e.g page layout, user interface, graphics, text, audio) is known as the front-end. The back-end comprises the organization and efficiency of the source code, invisible scripted functions, and the server-side components that process the output from the front-end. Depending on the size of a Web development project, it may be carried out by a multi-skilled individual (sometimes called a web master), or a project manager may oversee collaborative design between group members with specialized skills.

Issues

As in most collaborative designs, there are conflicts between differing goals and methods of web site designs. These are a few of the ongoing ones.

Lack of collaboration in design

In the early stages of the web, there wasn't as much collaboration between web designs and larger advertising campaigns, customer transactions, social networking, intranets and extranets as there is now. Web pages were mainly static online brochures disconnected from the larger projects.

Many web pages are still disconnected from larger projects. Special design considerations are necessary for use within these larger projects. These design considerations are often overlooked, especially in cases where there is a lack of leadership, understanding or concern for the larger project to facilitate collaboration. This often results in unhealthy competition or compromise between departments, and less than optimal use of web pages.

Liquid versus fixed layouts

On the web the designer has no control over several factors, including the size of the browser window, the web browser used, the input devices used (mouse, touch screen, voice command, text, cell phone number pad, etc.) and the size and characteristics of available fonts.

Some designers choose to control the appearance of the elements on the screen by using specific width designations. This control may be achieved through the use of a HTML table-based design, or through the use of CSS. Whenever the text, images, and layout of a design do not change as the browser changes, this is referred to as a fixed width design. Proponents of fixed width design prefer the control over the look and feel of the site and the precision placement of objects on the page. Other designers choose a liquid design. A liquid design is one, like Wikipedia, where the design moves to flow content into the whole screen, or a portion of the screen, no matter what the size of the browser window. Proponents of liquid design prefer to use all the screen space available. Liquid design can be achieved through the use of CSS, by avoiding styling the page altogether, or by using HTML tables set to a percentage of the page. Both liquid and fixed design developers must make decisions about how the design should degrade on higher and lower screen resolutions. Sometimes the pragmatic choice is made to flow the design between a minimum and a maximum width. This allows the designer to avoid coding for the browser choices making up the long tail, while still using all available screen space.

Similar to liquid layout is the optional fit to window feature with Adobe Flash content. This is a fixed layout that optimally scales the content of the page without changing the arrangement or text wrapping when the browser is resized.

Flash

Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a proprietary, robust graphics animation/application development program used to create and deliver dynamic content, media (such as sound and video), and interactive applications over the web via the browser.

Flash is not a standard produced by a vendor-neutral standards organization like most of the core protocols and formats on the Internet. Flash is much more restrictive than the open HTML format, though, requiring a proprietary plugin to be seen, and it does not integrate with most web browser UI features like the "Back" button unless a hyperlink is programmed to link a new html page from the Flash file, in which case the animation of the previous page would reset. However, those restrictions may be irrelevant depending on the goals of the web site design.

According to a study, 98% of US Web users have the Flash Player installed, with 45%-56% (depending on region) having the latest version. Numbers vary depending on the detection scheme and research demographics.

Many graphic artists use Flash because it gives them exact control over every part of the design, and anything can be animated and generally "jazzed up". Some application designers enjoy Flash because it lets them create applications that don't have to be refreshed or go to a new web page every time an action occurs. Flash can use embedded fonts instead of the standard fonts installed on most computers. There are many sites which forego HTML entirely for Flash. Other sites may use Flash content combined with HTML as conservatively as gifs or jpegs would be used, but with smaller vector file sizes and the option of faster loading animations. Flash may also be used to protect content from unauthorized duplication or searching.

Flash detractors claim that Flash websites tend to be poorly designed, and often use confusing and non-standard user-interfaces. Up until recently, search engines have been unable to index Flash objects, which has prevented sites from having their contents easily found. This is because many search engine crawlers rely on text to index websites. It is possible to specify alternate content to be displayed for browsers that do not support Flash. Using alternate content also helps search engines to understand the page, and can result in much better visibility for the page. However, the vast majority of Flash websites are not disability accessible (for screen readers, for example) or Section 508 compliant. An additional issue is that sites which commonly use alternate content for search engines to their human visitors are usually judged to be spamming search engines and are automatically banned.

The most recent incarnation of Flash's scripting language (called "ActionScript", which is an ECMA language similar to JavaScript) incorporates long-awaited usability features, such as respecting the browser's font size and allowing blind users to use screen readers. Actionscript 2.0 is an Object-Oriented language, allowing the use of CSS, XML, and the design of class-based web applications.

CSS versus tables

Back when Netscape Navigator 4 dominated the browser market, the popular solution available for designers to lay out a Web page was by using tables. Often even simple designs for a page would require dozens of tables nested in each other. Many web templates in Dreamweaver and other WYSIWYG editors still use this technique today. Navigator 4 didn't support CSS to a useful degree, so it simply wasn't used.

After the browser wars were over, and Internet Explorer dominated the market, designers started turning toward CSS as an alternate means of laying out their pages. CSS proponents say that tables should be used only for tabular data, not for layout. Using CSS instead of tables also returns HTML to a semantic markup, which helps bots and search engines understand what's going on in a web page. All modern Web browsers support CSS with different degrees of limitations.

However, one of the main points against CSS is that by relying on it exclusively, control is essentially relinquished as each browser has its own quirks which result in a slightly different page display. This is especially a problem as not every browser supports the same subset of CSS rules. For designers who are used to table-based layouts, developing Web sites in CSS often becomes a matter of trying to replicate what can be done with tables, leading some to find CSS design rather cumbersome due to lack of familiarity. For example, at one time it was rather difficult to produce certain design elements, such as vertical positioning, and full-length footers in a design using absolute positions. With the abundance of CSS resources available online today, though, designing with reasonable adherence to standards involves little more than applying CSS 2.1 or CSS 3 to properly structured markup.

These days most modern browsers have solved most of these quirks in CSS rendering and this has made many different CSS layouts possible. However, some people continue to use old browsers, and designers need to keep this in mind, and allow for graceful degrading of pages in older browsers. Most notable among these old browsers are Internet Explorer 5 and 5.5, which, according to some web designers, are becoming the new Netscape Navigator 4 — a block that holds the World Wide Web back from converting to CSS design. However, the W3 Consortium has made CSS in combination with XHTML the standard for web design.

How it Looks vs. How it Works

Some web developers have a graphic arts background and may pay more attention to how a page looks than considering other issues such as how visitors are going to find the page via a search engine. Some might rely more on advertising than search engines to attract visitors to the site. On the other side of the issue, search engine optimization consultants (SEOs) obsess about how well a web site works technically and textually: how much traffic it generates via search engines, and how many sales it makes, assuming looks don't contribute to the sales. As a result, the designers and SEOs often end up in disputes where the designer wants more 'pretty' graphics, and the SEO wants lots of 'ugly' keyword-rich text, bullet lists, and text links. One could argue that this is a false dichotomy due to the possibility that a web design may integrate the two disciplines for a collaborative and synergistic solution. Because some graphics serve communication purposes in addition to aesthetics, how well a site works may depend on the graphic designer's visual communication ideas as well as the SEO considerations.

Another problem when using lots of graphics on a page is that download times can be greatly lengthened, often irritating the user. This has become less of a problem as the internet has evolved with high-speed internet and the use of vector graphics. This is an engineering challenge to increase bandwidth in addition to an artistic challenge to minimize graphics and graphic file sizes. This is an on-going challenge as increased bandwidth invites increased amounts of content.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Accessible Web design is the art of creating webpages that are accessible to everyone, using any device. It is especially important so that people with disabilities - whether due to accident, disease or old age - can access the information in Web pages and be able to navigate through the website.

To be accessible, web pages and sites must conform to certain accessibility principles. These can be grouped into the following main areas:

• use semantic markup that provides a meaningful structure to the document (i.e. web page)
• Semantic markup also refers to semantically organizing the web page structure and publishing web services description accordingly so that they can be recognised by other web services on different web pages. Standards for semantic web are set by IEEE
• use a valid markup language that conforms to a published DTD or Schema
• provide text equivalents for any non-text components (e.g. images, multimedia)
• use hyperlinks that make sense when read out of context. (e.g. avoid "Click Here.")
• don't use frames
• use CSS rather than HTML Tables for layout.
• author the page so that when the source code is read line-by-line by user agents (such as a screen readers) it remains intelligible. (Using tables for design will often result in information that is not.)

However, W3C permits an exception where tables for layout either make sense when linearized or an alternate version (perhaps linearized) is made available.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Before creating and uploading a website, it is important to take the time to plan exactly what is needed in the website. Thoroughly considering the audience or target market, as well as defining the purpose and deciding what content will be developed are extremely important.

Purpose

It is essential to define the purpose of the website as one of the first steps in the planning process. A purpose statement should show focus based on what the website will accomplish and what the users will get from it. A clearly defined purpose will help the rest of the planning process as the audience is identified and the content of the site is developed. Setting short and long term goals for the website will help make the purpose clear and plan for the future when expansion, modification, and improvement will take place. Also, goal-setting practices and measurable objectives should be identified to track the progress of the site and determine success.

Audience

Defining the audience is a key step in the website planning process. The audience is the group of people who are expected to visit your website – the market being targeted. These people will be viewing the website for a specific reason and it is important to know exactly what they are looking for when they visit the site. A clearly defined purpose or goal of the site as well as an understanding of what visitors want to do/feel when they come to your site will help to identify the target audience. Upon considering who is most likely to need/use the content, a list of characteristics common to the users such as:

• Audience Characteristics
• Information Preferences
• Computer Specifications
• Web Experience

Taking into account the characteristics of the audience will allow an effective website to be created that will deliver the desired content to the target audience.

Content

Content evaluation and organization requires that the purpose of the website be clearly defined. Collecting a list of the necessary content then organizing it according to the audience's needs is a key step in website planning. In the process of gathering the content being offered, any items that do not support the defined purpose or accomplish target audience objectives should be removed. It is a good idea to test the content and purpose on a focus group and compare the offerings to the audience needs. The next step is to organize the basic information structure by categorizing the content and organizing it according to user needs. Each category should be named with a concise and descriptive title that will become a link on the website. Planning for the site's content ensures that the wants/needs of the target audience and the purpose of the site will be fulfilled.

Compatibility and restrictions

Because of the market share of modern browsers (depending on your target market), the compatibility of your website with the viewers is restricted. For instance, a website that is designed for the majority of websurfers will be limited to the use of valid XHTML 1.0 Strict or older, Cascading Style Sheets Level 1, and 1024x768 display resolution. This is because Internet Explorer is not fully W3C standards compliant with the modularity of XHTML 1.1 and the majority of CSS beyond 1. A target market of more alternative browser (e.g. Firefox and Opera) users allow for more W3C compliance and thus a greater range of options for a web designer.

Another restriction on webpage design is the use of different Image file formats. The majority of users can support GIF, JPEG, and PNG (with restrictions). Again Internet Explorer is the major restriction here, not fully supporting PNG's advanced transparency features, resulting in the GIF format still being the most widely used graphic file format for transparent images.

Many website incompatibilities go unnoticed by the designer and unreported by the users. The only way to be certain a website will work on a particular platform is to test it on that platform.

Planning documentation

Documentation is used to visually plan the site while taking into account the purpose, audience and content, to design the site structure, content and interactions that are most suitable for the website. Documentation may be considered a prototype for the website – a model which allows the website layout to be reviewed, resulting in suggested changes, improvements and/or enhancements. This review process increases the likelihood of success of the website.

First, the content is categorized and the information structure is formulated. The information structure is used to develop a document or visual diagram called a site map. This creates a visual of how the web pages will be interconnected, which helps in deciding what content will be placed on what pages. There are three main ways of diagramming the website structure:

• Linear Website Diagrams will allow the users to move in a predetermined sequence;
• Hierarchical structures (of Tree Design Website Diagrams) provide more than one path for users to take to their destination;
• Branch Design Website Diagrams allow for many interconnections between web pages such as hyperlinks within sentences.

In addition to planning the structure, the layout and interface of individual pages may be planned using a storyboard. In the process of storyboarding, a record is made of the description, purpose and title of each page in the site, and they are linked together according to the most effective and logical diagram type. Depending on the number of pages required for the website, documentation methods may include using pieces of paper and drawing lines to connect them, or creating the storyboard using computer software.

Some or all of the individual pages may be designed in greater detail as a website wireframe, a mock up model or comprehensive layout of what the page will actually look like. This is often done in a graphic program, or layout design program. The wireframe has no working functionality, only planning.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

In web development, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS is used by both the authors and readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentational characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content. CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

The CSS specifications are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Internet media type (MIME type) text/css is registered for use with CSS by RFC 2318 (March 1998).

Browser support

A 'CSS filter'[8] is a coding technique that aims to effectively hide or show parts of the CSS to different browsers, either by exploiting CSS-handling quirks or bugs in the browser, or by taking advantage of lack of support for parts of the CSS specifications. Using CSS filters, some designers have gone as far as delivering entirely different CSS to certain browsers in order to ensure that designs are rendered as expected. Because very early web browsers were either completely incapable of handling CSS, or render CSS very poorly, designers today often routinely use CSS filters that completely prevent these browsers from accessing any of the CSS.

An example of a well-known CSS browser bug is the Internet Explorer box model bug, where box widths are interpreted incorrectly in several versions of the browser, resulting in blocks which are too narrow when viewed in Internet Explorer, but correct in standards-compliant browsers. The bug can be avoided in Internet Explorer 6 by using the correct doctype in (X)HTML documents. CSS hacks and filters are used to compensate for bugs such as this, just one of hundreds of CSS bugs that have been documented in various versions of Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer (including Internet Explorer 7)^[1]. [1]

Even when the availability of CSS-capable browsers made CSS a viable technology, the adoption of CSS was still held back by designers' struggles with browsers' incorrect CSS implementation and patchy CSS support. Even today, these problems continue to make the business of CSS design more complex and costly than it should be, and cross-browser testing remains a necessity. Other reasons for continuing non-adoption of CSS are: its perceived complexity, authors' lack of familiarity with CSS syntax and required techniques, poor support from authoring tools, the risks posed by inconsistency between browsers and the increased costs of testing.

Currently there is strong competition between Mozilla's Gecko layout engine, the WebKit layout engine used in Apple's Safari, Opera's Presto layout engine, and the KHTML engine used in KDE's Konqueror browser - each of them is leading in different aspects of CSS. As of 2007, Internet Explorer remains the worst at rendering CSS as judged by World Wide Web Consortium standards ([2] as linked from [3]).

References

Further reading

• Eric A. Meyer: Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, Third Edition, ISBN 0596527330
• Eric A. Meyer: Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference, McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, ISBN 0-07-213178-0
• Keith Schengili-Roberts: Core CSS, 2nd Edition, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-009278-9
• Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos, ISBN 0-321-19312-1
• The Zen of CSS Design (co-authored by CSS Zen Garden Owner, Dave Shea, and Molly E. Holzschlag), ISBN 0-321-30347-4
• Eric Meyer On CSS, ISBN 0-7357-1245-X
• More Eric Meyer On CSS, ISBN 0-7357-1425-8
• Dan Cederholm: Web Standards Solutions, The Markup and Style Handbook, Friends of Ed, ISBN 1-59059-381-2 (paperback) (Author's site)
• Kynn Bartlett: Teach Yourself CSS in 24 Hours, 2nd Edition, Sams Publishing, ISBN 0-672-32906-9 (book's companion site)
• Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets, PhD thesis, by Håkon Wium Lie - provides an authoritative historical reference of CSS
• Jeffrey Zeldman: Designing With Web Standards, New Riders, ISBN 0-7357-1201-8 (paperback) (book's companion site)
• Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation, (co-authored by Owen Briggs, Steven Champeon, Eric Costello, and Matt Patterson), Friends of Ed, ISBN 1-59059-231-X

Links

• CSS at the Open Directory Project
• Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web Chapter 20 of the book Cascading Style Sheets, designing for the Web, by Håkon Wium Lie and Bert Bos (2nd edition, 1999, Addison Wesley, ISBN 0-201-59625-3) - provides a light history of CSS.
• CSS home page at W3C - Includes links to the CSS specifications.
• Reset CSS - Reset styles set by browsers

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional under Windows XP.
Developed by: Adobe Systems (formerly by Macromedia)
Latest release: CS4 (10.0.0.544) / 15 October 2008; 123 days ago
Written in: C++
OS: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X
Type: Multimedia
License: Proprietary EULA

Adobe Flash, or simply Flash, refers to both the Adobe Flash Player, and to the Adobe Flash Professional multimedia authoring program. Adobe Flash Professional is used to create content for the Adobe Engagement Platform (such as web applications, games and movies, and content for mobile phones and other embedded devices). The Flash Player, developed and distributed by Adobe Systems (which acquired Macromedia in a merger that was finalized in December 2005), is a client application available in most common web browsers. It features support for vector and raster graphics, a scripting language called ActionScript and bi-directional streaming of audio and video. There are also versions of the Flash Player for mobile phones and other non-PC devices.

Strictly speaking, Adobe Flash Professional is an integrated development environment (IDE) while Flash Player is a virtual machine used to run, or parse, the Flash files. But in contemporary colloquial terms "Flash" can refer to the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.

Since its introduction in 1996, Flash technology has become a popular method for adding animation and interactivity to web pages; several software products, systems, and devices are able to create or display Flash. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, various web-page components, to integrate video into web pages, and more recently, to develop rich Internet applications.

The Flash files, traditionally called "Flash movies" or "Flash games", have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie with the .exe extension in Windows. Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are utilized from within .swf files.

Links

• Adobe Flash Player

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Adobe Flash Tutorial -- Basic animation.

A browser exploit is a short piece of code that exploits a software bug in a web browser such that the code makes the browser do something unexpected, including crash, read or write local files, propagate a virus or install spyware. Malicious code may exploit HTML, JavaScript, Images, ActiveX, Java and other internet technologies. HTML alone is harmless (can only crash browser in some cases on vulnerable web browsers), however, in conjunction with malicious ActiveX or Java code, it can potentially freeze or crash a browser, or even crash the computer running that browser.

The term "browser exploit" can also refer to the actual bug in the browser code.

Browser exploits families

Cross Zone Scripting exploits vulnerabilities related to the "zone" concept in some browsers; i.e. a page in "Internet zone" is able to initate execution with "Local Computer", "Local Intranet" or "Trusted Sites" zone privileges.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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In cross-site cooking, the attacker exploits a browser bug to send an invalid cookie to a server.

Cross-site cooking is a type of browser exploit which allows a site attacker to set a cookie for a browser into the cookie domain of another site server.

Cross-site cooking can be used to perform session fixation attacks, as a malicious site can fixate the session identifier cookie of another site.

Other attack scenarios may also possible, for example: attacker may know of a security vulnerability in server, which is exploitable using a cookie. But if this security vulnerability requires e.g. an administrator password which attacker does not know, cross-site cooking could be used to fool innocent users to unintentionally perform the attack.

Cross site. Cross-site cooking is similar in concept to cross-site scripting, cross-site request forgery, cross-site tracing, cross-zone scripting etc., in which that it involves the ability to move data or code between different web sites (or in some cases, between e-mail / instant messages and sites). These problems are linked to the fact that web browser is a shared platform for different information / applications / sites. Only logical security boundaries maintained by browsers ensures that one site cannot corrupt or steal data from another. However a browser exploit such as cross-site cooking can be used to move things across the logical security boundaries.

Origins

The name cross-site cooking and concept was not coined by Michal Zalewski in 2006. It was in use much earlier. The name is a mix of cookie and cross-site, attempting to describe the nature of cookies being set across sites.

In Michal Zalewski's article of 2006, Benjamin Franz was credited for his discovery, who in May 1998 reported a cookie domain related vulnerability to vendors. Benjamin Franz published the vulnerability and discussed it mainly as a way to circumvent "privacy protection" mechanisms in popular browsers. Michal Zalewski concluded that the bug, 8 years later, was still present (unresolved) in some browsers and could be exploited for cross-site cooking. Various remarks such as "vendors [...] certainly are not in a hurry to fix this" was made by Zalewski and others.

Links

• Cross-Site Cooking article by Michal Zalewski. Details concept, 3 bugs which enables Cross Site Cooking. One of these bugs is the age old bug originally found by Benjamin Franz.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Cross-site request forgery, also known as one click attack or session riding and abbreviated as CSRF (Sea-Surf) or XSRF, is a kind of malicious exploit of websites. Although this type of attack has similarities to cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site scripting requires the attacker to inject unauthorized code into a website, while cross-site request forgery merely transmits unauthorized commands from a user the website trusts.

Example and characteristics

The attack works by including a link or script in a page that accesses a site to which the user is known to have authenticated. For example, one user, Bob, might be browsing a chat forum where another user, Alice, has posted a message with an image that links to Bob's bank. Suppose that, as the URL for the image tag, Alice has crafted a URL that submits a withdrawal form on Bob's bank's website. If Bob's bank keeps his authentication information in a cookie, and if the cookie hasn't expired, then Bob's browser's attempt to load the image will submit the withdrawal form with his cookie, thus authorizing a transaction without Bob's approval.

A cross-site request forgery is a confused deputy attack against a Web browser. The deputy in the bank example is Bob's Web browser which is confused into misusing Bob's authority at Alice's direction.

The following characteristics are common to CSRF:

• Involve sites that rely on a user's identity
• Exploit the site's trust in that identity
• Trick the user's browser into sending HTTP requests to a target site
• Involve HTTP requests that have side effects

At risk are web applications that perform actions based on input from trusted and authenticated users without requiring the user to authorize the specific action. A user that is authenticated by a cookie saved in his web browser could unknowingly send an HTTP request to a site that trusts him and thereby cause an unwanted action.

CSRF attacks using images are often made from Internet forums, where users are allowed to post images but not JavaScript.

Here is an example of an attack on Digg. Here is another example of an attack on Amazon.com, and one on Google's Adsense.

Effects

This attack relies on a few assumptions:

• The attacker has knowledge of sites the victim has current authentication on (more common on web forums, where this attack is most common)
• The attacker's "target site" has persistent authentication cookies, or the victim has a current session cookie
• The "target site" doesn't have secondary authentication for actions

While having potential for harm, the effect is mitigated by the attackers need to "know his audience" such that he attacks a small familiar community of victims, or a more common "target site" has poorly implemented authentication systems (for instance, if a common book reseller offers 'instant' purchases without re-authentication).

References

1. ^ RFC 2616 9.1.1
2. ^ Dark Reading, CSRF Vulnerability: A Sleeping Giant, accessed 2006-10-18

• Cross Site Request Forgeries aka CSRF
• Cross-Site Request Forgeries
• The Cross-Site Request Forgery FAQ
• Security Corner: Cross-Site Request Forgeries
• Foiling Cross-Site Attacks
• Security Tips for Web Developers
• Cross Site Reference Forgery (sic)
• What is Cross Site Request Forgery?
• Preventing CSRF efficiently
• Sla.ckers Forum
• CSRF Attacks and Protecting Your Site

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

In computing, a feed aggregator, also known as a feed reader or simply as an aggregator, is client software or a Web application which aggregates syndicated web content such as news headlines, blogs, podcasts, and vlogs in a single location for easy viewing.

Functions

Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being "pulled" to the subscriber, as opposed to "pushed" with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some "pushed" information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed.

Aggregator features are frequently built into portal sites (such as My Yahoo! and iGoogle), modern Web browsers and email programs.

The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in a single browser display or desktop application. Such applications are also referred to as RSS readers, feed readers, feed aggregators, news readers or search aggregators. Aggregators with podcasting capabilites can automatically download media files, such as MP3 recordings. In some cases, these can be automatically loaded onto portable media players (like iPods) when they are connected to the PC.

Recently, so-called RSS-narrators have appeared, which not only aggregate text-only news feeds, but also convert them into audio recordings for offline listening.

The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom.

Links

• Feed Readers at the Open Directory Project
• NewsOnFeeds.com's list of news aggregators
• AggCompare - A community-edited comparison chart of news aggregators

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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The logo used by Apple to represent Podcasting

A podcast is a digital media file, or a series of such files, that is distributed over the Internet using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and personal computers. A podcast is a specific type of webcast which, like 'radio', can mean either the content itself or the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also termed podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. The term "podcast" is a portmanteau of the name of Apple's portable music player, the iPod, and broadcast[1]; a "pod" refers to the iPod, and "cast" to the idea of broadcasting.

In other words, a podcast is a collection of files (usually audio but may include video) residing at a unique web feed address. People can "subscribe" to this feed by submitting the feed address to an aggregator (like iTunes - software that runs on the consumer's computer). When new "episodes" become available in the podcast they will be automatically downloaded to that user's computer. Unlike radio or streaming content on the web, podcasts are not real-time. The material is pre-recorded and users can check out the material at their leisure, offline.

Though podcasters' web sites may also offer direct download or streaming of their content, a podcast is distinguished from other digital media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically, using an aggregator or feed reader capable of reading feed formats such as RSS or Atom.

Certain podcasts can even be live and interactive. Dozens of podcast enthusiasts can be on at once, with the "host" being able to control their audience in the same way a radio host can.

Other uses

Podcasting's initial appeal was to allow individuals to distribute their own "radio shows," but the system quickly became used in a wide variety of other ways, including distribution of school lessons,^[1] official and unofficial audio tours of museums, conference meeting alerts and updates, and by police departments to distribute public safety messages. For example, the Pediaphon project provides dynamically generated podcasts of all English, French and German language Wikipedia articles.

Podcasting is becoming increasingly popular in education. Podcasts enable students and teachers to share information with anyone at anytime. An absent student can download the podcast of the recorded lesson. It can be a tool for teachers or administrators to communicate curriculum, assignments and other information with parents and the community. Teachers can record book talks, vocabulary or foreign language lessons, international pen pal letters (podcast pals!), music performance, interviews, debates. Podcasting can be a publishing tool for student oral presentations. Video podcasts can be used in all these ways as well.

Trademarks

In February 5, 2005, Shae Spencer Management LLC of Fairport, New York filed a trademark application to register PODCAST for an 'online prerecorded radio program over the internet'.[4] In 2005-9-9, United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected the application. The rejection notice cited Wikipedia's Podcast entry had described the history of the term.^[2]

As of September 19, 2005, known trademarks that capitalize on podcast include: Podcast Realty, GuidePod, PodGizmo, Pod-Casting, MyPod, Podvertiser, ePodcast, PodCabin, Podcaster, PodShop, PodKitchen, Podgram, GodPod and Podcast.^[3]

As of February 2007, there have been 24 attempts to register trademarks containing the word 'PODCAST' in United States, but only 'PODCAST READY' from Podcast Ready, Inc. was approved.^[4]

Other

In November of 2004, Pittsburgh-based podcast hosting service Liberated Syndication was launched. The company, also known as Libsyn, was one of the first podcast hosting companies on the scene.

In 2005, it was reported that Adam Curry had anonymously edited the podcasting entry on Wikipedia to remove credits from other people and to inflate his role in its creation.^[5] The business model of Curry's podcasting network Podshow has since been criticised by many in the industry, and has been accused of exploitative practices in its dealings with independent podcasters.

In September 26, 2006, It was reported that Apple Computer started to crack down on businesses using the word 'pod' in product and company names. Apple sent a cease-and-desist order that week to Podcast Ready, which markets an application known as myPodder.^[6] Lawyers for Apple contended that the term 'pod' has been used by the public to refer to Apple's music player so extensively that it falls under Apple's trademark protection.^[7] It was speculated that activity was part of a bigger campaign for Apple to expand the scope of its existing iPod trademark, which included trademarking 'IPODCAST', 'IPOD Socks', 'POD'.[8] On November 16, 2006, Apple Trademark Department returned a letter claiming Apple does not object to third party usage of 'podcast' to refer to podcasting services, and Apple does not license the term.^[9]

References

Links

• Creative Commons Podcasting Legal Guide
• Rufus White's Step-by-Step Guide to creating your own podcast

Lists of podcast directories: (not individual directories)

• CastWiki-Alphabetical list of podcast and video podcast directories
• Podcast 411 Directory of Directories
• Open Culture (oculture.com) Lists of free cultural and educational podcasts.
• Podcasting News' List of Podcast Directories
• Language & Rough Guides for Travel & Backpacking
• iPodder.org OPML Directory Listings
• promopicker.com - Promopicker Podcasting Directory
• podfeed.net Directory
• List of video podcast directories
• Wizzard Media Directory

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Web analytics is the study of the behaviour of website visitors. In a commercial context, web analytics especially refers to the use of data collected from a web site to determine which aspects of the website work towards the business objectives; for example, which landing pages encourage people to make a purchase.

Data collected almost always includes web traffic reports. It may also include e-mail response rates, direct mail campaign data, sales and lead information, user performance data such as click heat mapping, or other custom metrics as needed. This data is typically compared against key performance indicators for performance, and used to improve a web site or marketing campaign's audience response.

Many different vendors provide web analytics software and services.

References

• Web Traffic Data Sources and Vendor Comparison by GA Experts

External links

Books:

• Web Analytics Demystified by Eric T. Peterson, Celilo Group Media (2004), ISBN 0-9743584-2-8
• Web Site Measurement Hacks by Eric T. Peterson, O'Reilly (2005), ISBN 0-596-00988-7
• Web Analytics: An Hour A Day by Avinash Kaushik, Sybex (2007), ISBN 978-0470130650
• Web Analytics Strategies by G. Fragola, L. Paxia, ICC (2007), ISBN 978-88-902809-0-0 (In Italian)

Directories of web analytics vendors:

• Web Analytics Report by CMS Watch
• Web Analytics Book by S. Wenzel
• Web Analytics Listings by M. Ryan

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Successful Web Analytics Approaches by Avinash Kaushik (Complete presentation by Avinash Kaushik at Google Conversion University).

Organized by function a website may be

• a personal website
• a business website
• a government website or
• a non-government website
• a non-profit organization website or blog

It could be the work of an individual, a business or other organization and is typically dedicated to some particular topic or purpose. Any website can contain a hyperlink to any other website, so the distinction between individual sites, as perceived by the user, may sometimes be blurred.

Websites are written in, or dynamically converted to, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and are accessed using a software program called a Web browser, also known as a HTTP client. Web pages can be viewed or otherwise accessed from a range of computer-based and Internet-enabled devices of various sizes, including desktop computers, laptop computers, PDAs and cell phones.

A website is hosted on a computer system known as a web server, also called an HTTP server, and these terms can also refer to the software that runs on these system and that retrieves and delivers the Web pages in response to requests from the website users. Apache is the most commonly used Web server software (according to Netcraft statistics) and Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) is also commonly used.

A static website is one that has web pages stored on the server in the same form as the user will view them. They are edited using three broad categories of software:

• Text editors. such as Notepad or TextEdit, where the HTML is manipulated directly within the editor program
• WYSIWYG editors. such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver, where the site is edited using a GUI interface and the underlying HTML is generated automatically by the editor software
• Template-based editors, such as Rapidweaver and iWeb, which allow users to quickly create and upload websites to a web server without having to know anything about HTML, as they just pick a suitable template from a palette and add pictures and text to it in a DTP-like fashion without ever having to see any HTML code.

A dynamic website is one that has frequently changing information or collates information on the hop each time a page is requested. For example, it would call various bits of information from a database and put them together in a pre-defined format to present the reader with a coherent page. It interacts with users in a variety of ways including by reading cookies recognizing users' previous history, session variables, server side variables etc., or by using direct interaction (form elements, mouseovers, etc.). A site can display the current state of a dialogue between users, monitor a changing situation, or provide information in some way personalized to the requirements of the individual user.

There is a wide range of software systems, such as Java Server Pages (JSP), the PHP and Perl programming languages, Active Server Pages (ASP) and ColdFusion (CFM) that are available to generate dynamic Web systems and dynamic sites. Sites may also include content that is retrieved from one or more databases or by using XML-based technologies such as RSS.

Static content may also be dynamically generated either periodically, or if certain conditions for regeneration occur (cached) in order to avoid the performance loss of initiating the dynamic engine on a per-user or per-connection basis.

Plugins are available to expand the features and abilities of Web browsers, which use them to show active content, such as Flash, Shockwave or applets written in Java. Dynamic HTML also provides for user interactivity and realtime element updating within Web pages (i.e., pages don't have to be loaded or reloaded to effect any changes), mainly using the DOM and JavaScript, support which is built-in to most modern Web browsers.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Turning a website into an income source is a common practice for web-developers and website owners. There are several methods for creating a website business which fall into two broad categories.

1. Online Information Businesses

Some websites offer no products at all but provide free information with income coming from clicks the visitors make on advertisements (see contextual ads). There is a wide range of monetizing used on such sites and the sites themselves are actively traded and bought and sold as going concerns.

Guides have been published which explain how to create such a business. See links at bottom of page.

2. Online Shop Businesses

While most business websites serve as a shop window for brick and mortar businesses it is increasingly the case that some websites are businesses in their own right. These websites are fully self-contained businesses entities offering, for example, immediate downloads of retail software on payment of the product's price via their shopping cart.

Guides have been published which explain how to create such a business.

There are many varieties of Web sites, each specializing in a particular type of content or use, and they may be arbitrarily classified in any number of ways. A few such classifications might include:

Some websites may be included in one or more of these categories. For example, a business website may promote the business's products, but may also host informative documents, such as white papers. There are also numerous sub-categories to the ones listed above. For example, a porn site is a specific type of eCommerce site or business site (that is, it is trying to sell memberships for access to its site). A fan site may be a dedication from the owner to a particular celebrity.

Websites are constrained by architectural limits (e.g., the computing power dedicated to the website). Very large websites, such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google employ many servers and load balancing equipment such as Cisco Content Services Switches to distribute visitor loads over multiple computers at multiple locations.

In January of 2007, Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, reported that there were 106,875,138 Web sites with domain names and content on them in 2007, compared to just 18,000 Web sites in August 1995.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.