Web Site
Starting with the basics, a web site is a collection of electronically generated pages of information that includes some degree of ability for the user to interact with the pages of the web site. Originally, web sites only provided very limited interactive options, primarily giving the user the ability to click highlighted pieces of text known as "hyperlinks" or "links", which would then take the user to another page either on the web site or to a page on a different web site.
Web sites are organized under domain names. A domain is a name given to a collection of information that is controlled by an authority, in most cases the owner of the domain name. A domain name is used to identify a web site because the written characters of a domain name makes it easier for a human to identify and select that domain for examination than to enter a series of numbers or codes that a computer would recognize and be able to process.
A web site is made available to the public via a web server. A server is essentially a large computer designed to be able to handle large numbers of requests for information by users at any given time. The process of making this information available to the public is known as web site hosting, or simply hosting. A web host makes the pages of a web site available for public access 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
Users access a web site using a browser, a piece of software that creates a window on the computer that displays the information available on the particular page of the web site that the user has chosen to visit. The most popular free browsers available, based on the number of people who use them on a regular basis, are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome. Also, Opera is a fee-paid browser that enjoys some level of popularity on the 'net.
Besides the standard web browsers that run on desktop and laptop computers, there are also specialty browsers that run primarily on mobile devices. The number of such browsers is very high and creates a list longer than we can comfortably list on this page. Eventually, we believe that the mobile browser market will resolve itself to a handful of leaders.
Web site pages are written using a programming language that renders the page's contents in the browser. The original web page programming language is known as HTML or HyperText Markup Language. HTML is currently under development in its fifth version, known as HTML5. Other "flavors" or variations of HTML also exist, including the very popular XHTML.
