Key Components to a Webpage

For today's class I have read chapter 3 of The Internet: The Basics, which was written by Jason Whitaker. As shown in the article, there are many key components that help someone to creating a good website. Such factors as text/hypertextuality, digital imaging, and audio-video(AV).

Hypertext as we may know allows to jump from one article to another, whether you click on a hyperlink or a picture. To be allowed this jump from one place to another, the Web relies on HTML and HTTP; this is the formatting language that the computer runs on (Whitaker). It is always important to include useful links and not to something that is irrelevant to your page.

Along with all the new advancements of web pages and their new capabilities, text still has critical role. Not only what you say has to be important, but the way it is laid out on the webpage matters as well. The text has to be able to say whatever the videos, pictures and audio cannot, or else the website can be a repeat of itself. The way you display your text also weighs heavily on the viewer of your website. You do not want use colors that blend into the background which make it hard to see or create a font which is too big or too small. Sans serif font can usually be the best, because it is a "proportional font which use chracters that take up only as much space as they require (Whitaker, p. 80)."

Since technology has advanced from analog to digital, it has become easier to upload images to a webpage. The size of the files have decreased due to the fact the file has become compressed. You can compress a file nearly to half its size without losing important qualities of the image (Whitaker). Vector images are not only smaller in size, but are based on mathematical equations(Whitaker). Therefore, if you resize a picture to be smaller or bigger the equation changes to to keep the image just as clean without any distortion. Digital imaging has these benefits over analog, but at the same time it is easier to alter pictures. So you should not always believe what you see. And ther person creating their website should not a use false pictures to deceive his or her viewers.

Audio files that once were on analog also became compressed files just like photos, making the files much smaller and easier to send and upload. The creation of MP3 and web radio have become so popular they outweigh the combination of text and image which have dominated the web for almost the past decade (Whitaker). The creation of Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) allows the viewer of a webpage to hear clips and parts of the song before song is completely downloaded (Whitaker). Personally, as a musician I prefer the quality of analog music over digital. Digitization of music takes away the crisp, raw quality of a track; it makes the song sound thinner and less filling.