The World Wide Web permeates or lives to an extraordinary degree. However, most of us are unaware of the its technical underpinnings. In this session we explore the nature of the Web and in particular the role of HTTP protocol and the HTML standard. We also identify the 'client/server' nature of the web and its implications. In this context we will gain an understanding of the role of the 'browser' in presenting a web page, and begin to understand pages are retrieved and rendered.

We can now explore the basics of HTML and we will try to get to grips with the fundamentals of the HTML language. As you will see, its structure and format is relatively straightforward, and you will be able to understand the basics very quickly. We will be focusing on a small number of 'tags' to get started, and also on the ways in which different html files can be linked together to form a site.

This lab will firstly introduce you to the tools we will use during the web development module and secondly introduce you to creating, editing, saving and displaying a web page.

The labs are where you will do the real learning in this module. In Lab0-01 you will become familiar with the editor Sublime. We will then use this editor to create a simple multi-page web site containing a small variety of text, images and links. In this lab we will explore some of the basic features of CSS, including colours, font and interesting techniques for setting styles across entire sections of a page.