Transcript 2Internet as a Publishing Channel

The Internet as a Publishing
Channel
Teppo Räisänen
LIIKE/OAMK
Web vs. Internet
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Web (WWW) is one of the Internet’s
services
The birth year of the Internet is usually
referred as 1978 or 1983
The Web was established in year 1990
Web is nowadays the most used of the
Internet’s services.
Web vs. Internet
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Can you think of any other Internet
services?
Expectations towards the Web
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In the beginning of the 2000s large
sums of money were invested into .com
companies
The burst of the .com bubble increased
suspicions towards the IT-field
There have been a lot of news about
Internet scams and hoaxes
Many sites contain debatable or
inaccurate information
Web 2.0, Social media
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During the last 10 years the things like
Web 2.0, Social media, cloud computing
have raised a lot of attention
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We are seeing another .Com bubble
Hopefully not as bad as the first one
Web Sites (1)
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Web a common publishing channel for
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individual people
businesses
other kinds of organizations
Web publishing is becoming more and
more common
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The reason is that we have more and more
web users and implementing Web pages
thas become easier and cheaper
Web Sites (2)
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In the early days the role of common
people was to observe the contents of
the Web pages
Many sites were implemented in quite
amateurish fashion
Even at 1993 the dictionaries referred
to WWW as ”World Weather Watch”
Web Sites (3)
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Nowadays Web sites are been built for
many kinds of purposes:
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Home pages of individual people
Information about organizations
E-commerce sites
Virtual reality sites
Download sites
Social networking sites
Etc.
Web Sites (4)
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The amount of the sites has been
growing rapidly:
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Year 1995: 18000 sites
Year 2004 : 50 000 000 sites
Nowadays: over 200 000 000 sites
Billions of individual pages
Web Sites (5)
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Also the availability of the Web has
been expanding globally
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Cheaper devices
Better connectivity
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WiFi (PANOulu)
In New York there are homeless who can
still utilize the Internet
Client – server model
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Web uses a so called client-server
model
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Server-side consists of Web-servers
Client-side is Web-browsers
Client – server model
Client – server model
Web-clients
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What Web-clients can you name?
Web page vs. Web site
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A site consists of individual pages
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The pages of the site share
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www.oamk.fi/ is a site, which has many
pages (e.g. www.oamk.fi/english/ouas/)
A consistent look & feel
Links between them
The pages don’t have to be located in
the same server (Usually they are)
Information Search (1)
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Information search from the Web has
become one of the basic IT-skills
With faster connections, the users are
requiring faster and more accurate
results
Many Web sites also include internal
search functionalities
Information Search (2)
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Recognition of the correct information is
often problematic
The Web users want to
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find information quickly
see the information in an organized way
get help for finding more information about
the search topic
Often the users don’t know exactly
what they are looking for (= surfing)
Information Search (3)
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When designing a Web site, it is
important to offer an overview about
the contents:
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Header/footer texts
Images
”Aesthetic minimalism” is often
mentioned as a general principle of the
Web design
Search engines
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Often the Web users use search pages
to find information
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AltaVista
Google
Yahoo
The search engines are based on the
use of the bots &/ indexing
E-commerce Sites
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The popularity of buying over Web has
been increasing quickly
The factors affecting to the popularity
are
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easiness of buying
large amount of products available
fear of getting hoaxed (credit cards,
private information)
difficulties with returned products etc.
Web publishing (1)
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Even if Web publishing is a separate
area, it shares many rules & principles
with the print publishing:
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use of colors
fonts
layouts
On the other hand, there are special
requirements and restrictions (e.g.
designing for the browser versions &
user settings)
Web publishing (2)
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Nowadays implementing a Web site is
technically rather easy
Implementing a site with a good
usability and interesting contents is still
a challenging task
The Web sites also require updates:
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Contents
Web addresses / links
Etc.
The Representation of a Web
Page (1)
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Methods of viewing a page include:
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Computer display screen
PDA device / mobile phone browser
Printed on a paper
Most of the pages have been optimized
for computer displays
The Representation of a Web
Page (2)
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The browsers of different vendors (IE,
Opera, Mozilla-based) do not represent
the pages in an uniform way
It is possible to make the server
recognize the client requesting the page
and thus optimize the contents for
different kinds of environments
Accessibility (1)
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The users of the Web differ in
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Cognitive skills
Computer use experience
Sensory skills
Motoric skills
Accessibility has been set as one of the
Web’s general requirements (Compare
to the public buildings)
Accessibility (2)
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Many pages include restricting content
like:
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Plugin based functionalities (Flash, Java..)
Small, non-adjustable font sizes
Text contents that are difficult to
understand
’Universal accessibility’ is in practice
impossible to achieve, but it is still a
worthy goal
Markup
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Web pages are based on the use of a
markup language (HTML)
The browsers parse the markup and
present the page in a GUI view
HTML is implemented by
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the Web Editors (generated automatically)
Web designers (handwritten)