GWO's Internet and HTML FAQs
Q. Where is everything on the internet?
A. Each picture, sound, and word on the internet is located on some computer disk drive somewhere. For example, a certain picture might be located on the JPS company computer on disk drive Number 32 on track 4539.
Q. How do I keep track of THAT?
A. You don't - the internet does. All you need to know is the picture's internet name, called its Universal Resource Locator (URL). When you want to see the picture, simply put the URL in your "go to" box and hit "return". A request is sent to the internet and the computers of the internet figure out from the URL where the pic is located. The computer which has the pic then sends a copy back to your webtv box. Your Webtv box stores the info in its temporary memory (called RAM) and shows you the picture on your tv screen.
Q. What does a URL look like?
A. Most have this form:
http://www.companyname.com/directory/simplename.??? the .??? is called the "extension" and tells us something about what kind of file it is.
Q. How do I find out the URL for something?
A. There are lots of ways. Someone who knows it could tell it to you, for example. There are also big lists of URLs kept at websites called "search engines". You can search thru the URLs there for things that you might find interesting. But, much of the time, you don't even need to know any URLs! (See the next question)
Q. What is a "link"?
A. Many webpages have "links" on them. A link is a special picture or group of words. Your cursor will automatically surround any link that it gets close to. If you click on a link, webtv will enter a URL in your "go to" box for you just as if you had typed it in yourself. Here is a link to a search engine: Click here
Q. How many kinds of internet files can webtv look at?
A. There are really only 4 types: text, image, sound, and movie. Text files contain the kinds of things you can type on an ordinary typewriter like letters of the alphabet, numbers, and punctuation marks. Their URLs usually end in .htm or .html. Image files hold pictures and end in .gif or .jpg. Sound files hold sounds and have many different endings like .mid or .ram. Movie files end in .mpg, .swf, or .asx
Q. When I look at a webpage, it has images, words, and sounds. Why does its URL end in .html?
A. Actually, the webpage only appears to contain images and sounds. There is really nothing there but text. Part of the text contains instructions for your webtv box called HTML. HTML tells the box HOW to display the words. What size and what color to make them, for example. It also tells the webtv box the URLs for the pics and sounds that should be displayed with the page. Webtv automatically sends out a request for the pics and sounds and adds them to the tv display as they arrive from the internet. So, it looks like the webpage contains pics and sounds when it doesn't really.
Q. What does HTML stand for?
A. It is short for "HyperText Markup Language". When a book editor sends some text to his (human) printer, he adds "markup" instructions to tell the printer how to make the page look. For example, he might say "make the title of this chapter 1 inch tall and bright red". HTML is a markup language for computers (and Webtv boxes).
Q. Webtv can use HTML in email. How does that work?
A. Webtv is a little different from computers. Our emails are displayed as if they were little webpages. We actually are supposed to be on the internet when we read our email. Computer users can download their email to their own disk drive and read it when they are "offline". (We can read our email offline, too, but if the HTML in our email needs the internet, it will try to reconnect.) Because we are on the internet when we read our email, ALMOST everything you can do on a webpage, you can do in our email. We can make our email really fancy because of it, but it can make for problems when computer users try to read our email.
A. What is an email "attachment"?
Q. An attachment is a computer file which has been actually added to the end of an email. It moves thru the internet with the email like the tail of a kite. Personal computers can make and use any kind of file as an attachment. Webtv can only use an attachment if it is a .jpg or .gif image or a .wav sound file. Because we can use HTML in our emails, many people have the mistaken impression that the pics they see and the sounds they hear are "attachments". Usually they are not - they are the result of HTML just like in a webpage
Q. What is an email signature?
A. As I said, we can use HTML in our emails. We can do this every time we write an email. But it is kind of time-consuming and it is easy to make mistakes. So, webtv gave us a way to save the HTML once we get it exactly the way we want it. We save it in a place called our "signature box". Every email we send has the contents of the signature box added to it. (Unless we click on "remove signature" before we send. And you can always change your mind back and click on "add signature" to put it back.)
Q. What does HTML look like?
A. The designer of HTML needed to come up with a way that personal computers (and webtv boxes) could
tell the difference between ordinary words and HTML in a text file. He figured that nobody uses those pointy brackets > and < very much. So he uses them to mark HTML. The left-pointing bracket tells the webtv box "an html command is coming up". The right-pointing one tells the webtv box "that instruction has been completely spelled out". The next thing after a right bracket could be another command starting with < or could be ordinary words. The left bracket is always followed immediately by a short word or abbreviation from the HTML "vocabulary". This word is known as a "tag". Sometimes the tag is followed by other words called "attributes" which give the details of how the command is to be carried out. The webtv box reads the HTML just like text - from left to right and row by row obeying each command as it reads it. And some commands have an effect which stays going until webtv reads something that will stop it. To stop a tag, you use the same tag with a / in front of it. For example, FONT starts displaying letters in a special size or color, like the big red letters in the title of this page. /FONT goes back to displaying regular letters like in the Q and A section.
Q. Why can't I see the HTML when I look at a webpage or email?
A. That's the whole point. HTML is for the webtv box to look at, not you. If you want to see the HTML for yourself you can see it with the help of a "source viewer". There are many websites that provide those.
Q. How can I write HTML myself?
A. When you decide to write some HTML yourself you will do it with a "text editor". Remember, HTML is always part of a text file. A text editor is a program that helps you type things and make changes to what you've typed. Many websites have text editors. And your webtv box itself has one which you use every time you type something (like email, for example).
Q. Where can I learn HTML?
A. There are many places on the internet to learn, but I recommend the tutorials at:
www.draac.com
Q. What is bandwidth?
A. This term comes originally from radio. When you tune your radio, you set it to some number like 100.6. But the radio station's signal actually varies a bit from 100.55 to 100.65. That's ok, though, because your radio really accepts everything in that range when it is tuned to 100.6. This range is called "bandwidth". The greater the bandwidth the faster the radio station can send out information. Later, the term was used to describe similar features in communication equipment like telephones. Many telephones can share the same telephone line at the same time because each telephone is "tuned" to a different part of the line's bandwidth. Computers use that term too. When many people are requesting info at the same time, each is said to be using some of the computer's bandwidth. Naturally, every computer has limits to its bandwidth, so this limits how many people can get data at the same time. When this limit is reached, people have to take turns getting data and this can make internet surfing very slow.
Q. What is bandwidth theft?
A. As I said at the beginning, everything on the internet is stored on some computer. When people on the internet send out a request to see a file, the storage computer has to use some of its bandwidth to answer the request. Sometimes we see a picture or hear a song on the internet that we really like. We want it to be part of our webpage or email The simplest thing to do is just to put some HTML in our webpage or email that has the URL of the files we want to display. If you do this without the permission of the person who originally put the files on the internet, that is bandwidth theft. It is rude because he doesn't get any credit for his hard work. But, just as bad, it makes his storage computer do a lot of extra work filling all your requests for his data. He may even get charged money for it!
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