Why Website?

In a social setting, one has constant need to communicate with others. One has an option to live on an island (real or virtual among a sea of humans) and one typically has a choice of communicating with other humans. This article is how to effectively communicate in modern world.

A communication involves a producer of an idea and a listener of the idea. The objective of the communication is to convey a thought from one human body to another. It is reasonable to assume that both the producer of thought and consumer want it to accurately conveyed using shortest time. Delay and misunderstanding are not consistent with the objective of communication.

To communicate, a medium for transmission is required along with transmitter and receiver. One can use facilities provided by Nature (eyes, ears, other body parts, air) or one could use facilities created by humans (internet). Hear to Heart communication and other private methods that cannot be replicated across different humans in a predictable manner are outside the scope of this conversation.

The communication is specially relevant while setting up a new relationship whether for college admission or job interview when a candidate is seeking relationship with a discriminating organization. The college or company typically have some perspective on who the best candidate is and they use some tools to judge that. The grades provide an indicator of relative performance within the school and standardized test results provide a comparison with other school. These constitute the quantitative measures of evaluation.

The professionals know that relying simply on quantitative measures is not the smartest approach. They also like to know more about the shortlisted persons by reading what they have to say about themselves and speaking to them to validate everything else they have heard about the individual. A person with better training is likely to fumble less and therefore become more attractive to the audience. A professional actor has only one chance to make his pitch and he practices his lines until he is perfect.

Before the advent of printing press in 1440, the choice available to one person to communicate with many was limited to speaking in front of a crowd where people would have to step out of their homes to listen. The option of writing a large number of letters by hand is not really attractive. The world has evolved significantly since then and the challenge is to use the technology of today to effectively communicate the message. There are other articles on how to develop structured thoughts, this is about communicating that thought effectively.

The objective of writing is to communicate a thought. In modern world, most communication is targetted towards more than one person. The printing press required extensive investment in typesetting. Until the typewriter came along in 19th century, there was no easy way for a person to communicate with others. The advent of computers in 20th century changed the game again and put extensive typesetting power in the hand of an individual. Reading from a flat typewritten document was an improvement over the alternative but typesetting had significant advantage. An individual did not have access to typesetting facilities in their home office.

The intial development of typesetting in the hands of individual came with a drawback that specialized software was need to write and read files and the produced documnet was proprietary to that software. The innovators typically do not like standardization as it reduces the value of their products. The concept of mark up languages was developed but there was no widesprad use of it. In the late 20th century, the availability of Internet and development of a simple markup language caled HTML and a company called Netscape changed the game and the web became very popular.

With the advent of computers, browsers and standards, it is possible to communicate in a manner not seen before. The modern tools allow for text, video and audio to be presented to the whole world at a touch of finger. Not only these tools are good for creating structured documents, they also help develop the structured thought process because you can see the effecct of your work right away.

How does a website really work? We have already learnt that behind it is a bunch of text files that we can type on simple applications like text editor. Somehow writing a set of simple words translates into the magical display on browser that can be seen all over the world. The various components involved are

HTML	The marked up content. It shows what to display and helps the browser by telling various components and providing hints on how to format the final look of the page
CSS	For each type of html component, it tells browser how to format it. this allows for the change of look by simply changing the style sheet. Look at csszengarden.com.
Javascript	It is nice to be able to perform some tasks on the browser without making a trip to get the data again from the server. For example, if you want to display or hide a part of the page, you want the browser to be able to do that. This client side programming is typically implemented by Javascript.
Dynamic server pages	When you write first page, it is typically static in the sense that you have the web server read a text file on the server and provide it to the browser. A more interesting problem is for the browser to generate the html on-the-fly by running a computer program. It allows for more possibilities and that is typically how most web pages work in the real world.