Topic 140

features of a web page by Taro Kondo

Not all the web pages on the Internet are identical, due to the fact that there are different text editors for each of those. However the basic format is the same for all the web pages, because the core elements are essential for a web page to exist. According to Wikipedia, a web page is an 'information set', and so it has 'many kinds of information, which is able to be seen, heard or interact by the end user'. The type of information is categorized as either 'rendered' or 'hidden'. More common titles for the two groups are 'perceived' and 'internal'.

Within each groups, the information is furthur classified. So they have distinct characters. First focusing on perceived information, these branch out into what are called, textual, non-textual, and interactive information. Textual, obviously is typed words that may appear in variations, meaning in different color, size, and font. Non-textual on the other hand, would be things like images. Still images come in many forms too, such as GIF, JPEG and PNG.

Moving, or animated images normally are Flash, Shockwave or Java applet. These are all multimedia program which is a tool for enabling certain parts to function. In addition to images, non-textual includes audio, usually MIDI or WAV format. Interactive information, compared with the the previous two features, is rather unique although it is seen on the page also. One kind of interactive information would be hyperlink, which is a guidance for moving from one document to another. Often this is in blue, if not in a different color from the rest of the text, so that the person viewing the page can notice it.

There may be interactive illustrations, which is another example of interactive information, because the viewer can 'do' something with it, to certain extent. What is meant here is that they can activate or stop things like games and 'click to play' flash any time they wish. Taking this in account, buttons are also interactive.

Summing up, lack of any of the above features on the page would make it a very dull page and therefore it is important not to disregard the various items when constructing one. In contrast with perceived information, internal information does not appear directly on the page, but is hidden and it plays great role for making 'outside' details to come to where they belong and work properly. In another word, internal information has the ability to manipulate perceived information.

It must be noted that because of this, only the page editor can view and control the full content of internal information. The viewers can sometimes have access to it partially, though. By going to 'view' on the toolbar, then clicking 'source', it is possible to look at the Javascript, programming language that gives numerous instructions. Some of them might be to do with changing the size of images specifically. Other internal information that can be found in the Javascript would be 'comments'.

Comments are written in some occasions by the editors for reminders. If they work on the construction of their sites for a while and take a rest, before doing so they might want to write down whatever they had in mind, so that when they get back to restart, they can refer to those. In this way, efficiency goes up. As stated in the very beginning, not all the web pages are identical. The reason behind this could be that although the types of the features are the same, the editors use them uniquely, thus making their site more attractive.