Saturday, October 25, 2008

The page concept

Web content is dominated by the "page" concept. Having its beginnings in an academic settings, and in a setting dominated by type-written pages, the idea of the web was to link directly from one academic paper to another academic paper. This was a completely revolutionary idea in the late 1980s and early 1990s when the best a link could be made was to cite a reference in the midst of a type written paper and name that reference either at the bottom of the page or on the last page of the academic paper.

When it was possible for any person to write and own a Mosaic page, the concept of a "Home Page" blurred the idea of a page.[1] It was possible for anyone to own a "Web page" or a "Home Page" which in many cases the website contained many physical pages in spite of being called "a page". People often cited their "Home Page" to provide credentials, links to anything that a person supported, or any other individual content a person wanted to publish.

Even though "the web" may be the resource we commonly use to "get to" particular locations online, many different protocols [2] are invoked to access embedded information. When we are given an address, such as http://www.youtube.com, we expect to see a range of web pages, but in each page we have embedded tools to watch "video clips".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content

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