Web Pages

From the user's point of view, the page is the basic unit of the web. Web pages are written in the HTML language and sent to web browsers by a web server using the HTTP protocol. A web page has a similar format to a page from a book or magazine, with text and graphics displayed in a layout, and is displayed in a normal computer application window. Scroll bars are displayed if the page is too long or too wide, and you can perform the usual windowing functions such as minimize, maximize, change size, and close.

There are billions of web pages in existence on the Internet. Web pages have been published on almost every subject imaginable by almost every type of person and organization. There are a wide range of applications available that enable the construction of web pages, although most word processors now let you save documents in HTML format making basic creation quite straightforward.

You can sometimes tell from the name of the page whether it is an organization or a personal home page, because individual's home pages sometimes include "~" or "^", as in:

    http://www.twenty.net/~jsmith/home.html

Graphics are displayed in web pages if they haven't been turned off in your configuration settings to increase the download speed. With most browsers you can right-click on a picture and select "View Image" to view it by itself, or "Save Image As" to save the file to your computer for later viewing with another application. Graphics come in a wide range of formats. At one time GIF's were the most popular, but lately they are going out of style.

As you navigate through a chain of web pages, you can click on the Back button on your browser to go back, and Forward to go forward again.