What is a Web Address?
Internet
A web address is the location of a file on the web. They are called URLs.
See What is a URL?
What is The Web?
Internet
The Web or World Wide Web (WWW), is the part of the Internet made up of web pages with links (hyper links) to other pages on the Internet and written in a language called HTML which you need a web browser to read properly.
If you go to just about any website you will be taken to a page known as the homepage and from this page will be links to other pages. This simple concept of pages linking to other pages is the World Wide Web.
The web as we know it today was created by British engineer and computer scientist Sir Tim Berners Lee.
It is common to add the www prefix to domain names, but becoming less so. More often than not, you can leave out the www portion of a domain name and still get to the same website. The www part of the domain name is called a sub domain.
What is the Semantic Web?
Internet
Semantic means the meaning of. It has to do with what things mean. So the semantic of something is the meaning of that thing.
To human eyes the meaning of a link on the web might be self explanatory. It might be obvious that that a link to “What is The Big Web FAQ?” is going to take you to a definition of this site.
To a computer however, it is just a bunch of letters in the same way that Chinese is just a bunch of symbols to an Englishman.
The Semantic Web is where relationships such as links, are defined in a way that a computer can understand. In the previous example the simple word “definition” would tell a computer that the link takes us to a definition of what this website is about.
More than just links, the Semantic Web describes the relationships between things such as time, weight, distance, definition, popularity. Anything really.
What is a Web Bot?
Internet
A Web Bot or Web Robot is a bit of software that indexes websites for search engines such as Google or Bing. They read a page indexing it’s content. They then follow links form that page and index any other pages they can find.
Once a page has been “crawled” it is then made available on the search engine.
Also known as Web crawlers or Web spiders.
What are Hostnames?
Internet
Hostnames are Domain Names with at least one IP address. For example www.bigwebfaqcom and bigwebfaq.com are hostnames as they refer to the IP address of this website.
com on the other hand is not a Hostname.
What is a Subdomain?
Internet
In a domain name, a Subdomain is anything that comes before the TLD (Top Level Domain).
For example in www.bigwebfaq.com both www and bigwebfaq are subdomains although the right most subdomain is normally referred to as the Second Level Domain Name.
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What are the parts of a Domain Name?
Internet
A normal domain name looks like www.bigwebfaq.com or just bigwebfaq.com.
As you can see, it is made up of three parts called Labels. Labels are separated by the dots.
They are read from left to right but work from right to left. They start with a TLD (Top Level Domain). In this case the TLD is com.
The TLD is then followed by subdomains.
- Bigwebfaq is a subdomain of com.
- Www is a subdomain of bigwebfaq.
The first subdomain after the TLD is called the Second Level Domain Name. Bigwebfaq is the Second Level Domain Name. Anything after that such as www is just a subdomain.
There can be up to 127 levels of Labels. Each Label can be up to 63 characters in length. The full domain name may not exceed 253 characters.
What is a Markup Language?
Internet
Markup languages such as HTML use tags designed for the definition and presentation of text.
These tags can specify the formatting, layout and style of the text although styling is less common in HTML which relies on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for this.
What is Hypertext?
Internet
Hypertext is text displayed on the web with hyperlinks to other text and documents on the web. Hypertext does not just have to be text but can include images, videos, tables and more.
What is XML?
Internet
XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. It is a text based way of storing and transferring data in a very organised, structured and readable way.
It was created as a way of standardising the way raw data can be transferred over the web. Transferring data can be done in any number of ways, but a common language was needed so that applications and programs could easily read data from any number of sources.
XML files can be opened in any text editor and read by a computer or humans. Mostly however a computer will convert the data into a more aesthetic and readable format for viewing as it is still just a lot of text.
The following example shows how book data might be used in an XML file:
<book> <title>Nineteen Eighty-Four</title> <author> George Orwell</author > <published>1949</published> <genre>Social Science Fiction</genre > </book>
It stores the data inside tagged angle brackets. The first book tag tells us that we are about to get the data relating to a book. Then after the book tag we are given the title, author, published date and genre. Note how the tags end using the forward slash “/”. This makes the data both readable to us and also very readable to a computer.
Once the book tag has closed using the </book> tag another one can start. This way we can transfer a whole library of book related data in a single XML file.
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