First, the Internet. What is it? Well, on the page "What Does It All Mean?" I explain it thusly:

"In the beginning, only places like the Pentagon and NORAD had computers. They taught these computers to talk to each other over phone lines so that they wouldn't have to send sensitive defense data through the post office. (Those government agencies are all extremely suspicious of each other.) Eventually, lots of big agencies and companies had computers, and all the biggest ones--the servers--were wired together. That's all the Internet is, basically: a bunch of servers wired together so that data on one server can be transferred to another server for the asking. Thus, when you connect a personal computer to a server [such as the one called Blue, here at UVa], you can get data [for instance, web pages] from any other server that Blue is directly or indirectly wired to. [. . .]

Here's a stick-figure portrait I drew of the Internet. The little boxes are personal computers."

Nowadays, some of the straight lines in the picture above are regular telephone wires, but some are specially-invented data wires. That's the difference between dialing in on a modem (a telephone line) and having access to a local Ethernet such as the one on-grounds at UVa. Data lines are wider and more innately suited to the transfer of digital data, hence they can transfer data (e.g., load a web page) more quickly than telephone lines (though there are other factors that affect the speed of data transfer).

Web pages must be placed on a server, not on a personal computer, so that other people with personal computers can see them. This is called "publishing" a web page, as distinct from "writing" it. Web pages are written in a special language so that they can be viewed by web browsers such as Netscape or Internet Explorer: this language is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). (Nowadays gradually being replaced Extensible Markup Language, or XML, which is very similar.)

The web page you see in a browser is an illusion. For instance, this paragraph really looks like this to the computer:

<P ALIGN=LEFT>
<FONT FACE="Lucida Sans,Lucida,Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,Frutiger,sans-serif">
The web page you see in a browser is an illusion. For instance, this paragraph really looks like this:
</FONT>
</P>

Directions to the computer are placed within angle brackets < >, and exist in paired "tags" that surround the actual content of the page and control the way the content is displayed. To see the HTML code for any web page available online, you can choose View --> Source or View --> Page Source in your browser. It may look or sound difficult, but writing in basic HTML is only about two degrees more difficult than writing in basic Pig Latin, once you've learned the rules.

HTML code can be generated manually (by you, typing one tag at a time) or automatically (by a software program). For more about that, see the next page in this series: Creating a Web Page.

One other, final point to make is that a web site consists of several web pages plus the associated files. For instance, the picture of the Internet above is a single image file called "internet.jpg" that is merely referenced (indicated, pointed to) by the HTML page file that is named "How_Web_Sites_Work.html".

Drop me a line for more info, if you like, or for more lucid, in-person demonstrations.