Introduction

I thought this unit would be rather easy considering it's about the Internet and I've grown up using computers and chosen web developing as my niche for a design orientated career; however this topic takes a step back from just using the technologies the Internet offers. It instead explains the concepts that drove the WWWs development and evolution. For example, I never considered a web page like a book with choices that allow you to branch off at any point.

This topic sparked some thought when it discusses that hypertext is associative in organising information much like the human brain. Maybe the web is like a person, you can ask it a question and it finds the answers the same way the mind works. It's not the hardware or software doing the thinking though, these are more like the memory banks of the brain. It's your mind searching the information, which is organised by other people.

You could consider the World Wide Web as a World Wide Web of minds. Much like how the Internet is made up of many participating smaller networks connected to each other, maybe the web is the 'Mindnet', or 'Intermind' where the entire World's knowledge is connected into a giant single information source. As more people participate the information grows and is better organised.

Considering the amazing discoveries and creations by intellectual and creative geniuses were done by a signal mind, imagine the possibilities when hundreds, thousands, millions or even billions combined and collaborated on more than just Facebook or Twitter.

What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment.

Activity One - Show me the HTML! _{(...and not just a WYSIWYG interface)}

This activity looks at Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and What You See Is What You Get, or WYSIWYG editors. Having experience in web design I found the task rather basic so instead I'm going to discuss a sentence in the description of WYSIWYG editors that I find mis-leading:

...most contemporary designers don't even create HTML code by hand anymore.

Myself and the others I know all code by hand. WYSIWYG is sometimes used when adding content to a site, but I have not encountered a WYSIWYG editor that creates clean cross-browser compatible HTML and CSS for the complexity of a good design. Some very basic designs are fine, but even if the tool manages to generate code that displays correctly across major browsers it is often messy, hard to maintain and may use decrepit practices such as tables for layout.

WYSIWYG editing for just the HTML is an option. But for complex designs you shouldn't let it generate the CSS, and even then unless you're going for a truly semantic mark-up you may use many additional HTML elements which you can't usually add via WYSIWYG. It's also often faster to code it by hand especially thanks to tools like syntax highlighting, search and replace and 'as you type' code suggestions, word completion and correction.

I'm not saying WYSIWYG doesn't have its place. In fact I'm using it to write this blog post and for Web 2.0 it provides fantastic possibilities for content creation and online collaboration. I can admit to using it often as part of my design process, but I can never get totally away from editing my code by hand. There's just too many issues to deal with. What you see is not what you always get. Maybe in the future when there are less browser issues to adhere to I would agree with the above statement in my course work.

Activity Two - Going Way Back...

We take a look back through time at several websites to see how they have changed using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine provides access to 150 billion archived web pages from 6 months to 13 years ago ("Internet Archive: Wayback Machine").

Again Curtin's own website is an example: Curtin.edu.au

January 1997: The first thing I notice is the design. Compared to today's standard it's horrible! But then again look at my site when I first tried web developing: LukeFranklin.com. You'll be glad to hear I've come along way since then and I didn't call myself a web designer back then.

January 1999: Curtin's website has improved, but the design is still a dinosaur.

January 2002: I thought by now there would be some massive improvement, but in fact the design is worse than the previous one! I do notice some elements of modern web branding such as "Newsbytes" and "click here for help enrolling @ Curtin".

January 2005: What a difference a few years makes. It's still not quite the same as today, but Oasis is there; without that I wouldn't be able study off-campus.

Next we look at Apple.com in October 1996. That's almost 13 years ago, but for a company that makes hardware and software what I found was worse than I expected. I quickly forgave them after seeing an announcement that the GeoPort Telecom Adapter Kit has an update and it can now run at a whopping 28.8 Kbps! I thought my 256 Kbps ADSL connection was slow.

Google.com is on the list too. The earliest date it can be found in the archives is November 1998. The main page only has a header and two links. One to a stable prototype of Google with ONLY 25 million pages in the index. And the other to a more up to date "Might-work-some-of-the-time-prototype" as Google put it. The interface for the original Google search engine is identical to today's version, simple. Who would want to change their winning combination.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. Retrieved 28/09/2009, from http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Activity One - Routing in Action!

The first activity demonstrates how information on the Internet is sent through many computers to get to it's destination. Visual Tracert (Ouimet) is an online tool for tracking the jumps that Internet packets make on their way between client and server. It plots the locations of nodes that the packet travels through on a Google map.

In this activity we are asked to map the paths made to google.com, wikipedia.org, amazon.com and flickr.com then to find a website not hosted in America or Australia.

My request took 15,640 miles to travel to Google's server, Wikipedia landed in Saint Petersburg Florida; and the exact location of the final nodes in Amazon's trace were limited in scope, but all results including Flickr were located somewhere in the United States.

It needs to be noted that the distances and hops are warped because the connection has to run through YouGetSignal.com's host, also located in the US.

Finding a website hosted outside of the America and Australia was harder than I thought. The majority of my favourite websites weren't hosted elsewhere so I tried an Internet search for 'China' and chose chinadaily.com.cn as a subject. The trace jumped from Australia to Hong Kong then to YouGetSignal.com's host in America, it bounced back to Australia skipping Hong Kong then finally made its way to Beijing, China.

Out of interest I decided to see where my website: LukeFranklin.com is exactly hosted. I knew it was somewhere in the US. No surprise there, but I didn't expect it to land in Houston, Texas and not around the locations of my previous traces.

Activity Two - Who Owns What?

For this activity we extract the registration information for several domains from Whois records using AutoWhois.

The first domain we are required to check is the Curtin University website. In the course work it states the domain as Curtin.edu. Since this returns an invalid result I guess they meant Curtin.edu.au which is owned by Curtin University of Technology. Who'd of thought!

The next two domains were flickr.com and youtube.com. Flickr is owned by and registered to Yahoo!. Likewise YouTube belongs to Google and the domain is registered to them. Yahoo and Google are fairly dominant on the web and I suspect they own many domains and continue to purchase more ready to roll out new services as they expand.

Mickey.com was the third domain I had to check, but my IP address appears to be on Network Solutions black list and I was blocked from retrieving the registrants information:

The IP address from which you have visited the Network Solutions Registrar WHOIS
database is contained within a list of IP addresses that may have failed
to abide by Network Solutions' WHOIS policy. Failure to abide by this policy can
adversely impact our systems and servers, preventing the processing of other WHOIS requests.

The final two domains to lookup are obviously misspellings of Google and Yahoo's main domains: Gooogle.com and Yaho.com. These companies want to protect their products and have registered the variations to stop just anybody from setting up shop under their brand name which could be possibly damaging.

Ouimet, K. Visual Tracert Retrieved 23/09/2009, from http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/

AutoWhois Retrieved 24/09/2009, from http://hexillion.com/asp/samples/AutoWhois.vbs.asp

Introduction

The first weeks material is rather light on content, but it briefly covers usernames in the activity. It got me considering about the methods I've used to select IDs for Internet services and what makes a good username.

I think a username should be easy to remember, unique and personal, but not necessarily short; short doesn't always mean rememberable. If someone asks me to remember their email address I find it very difficult if it contains numbers. That includes dashes or dots as they are extra.

Activity - Thinking about Usernames

I prefer to use my full name for usernames as this seems professional and people can more easily find me. However namechk (David Gosse) shows that some people who share my name have already registered LukeFranklin as a username on sites like Google, Facebook and Twitter. From now on I'm going to try and register my username with new and upcoming services before they gain in popularity.

I already have accounts for several sites under LukeFranklin and use my website address (www.LukeFranklin.com, or wwwLukeFranklincom) as alternatives when the username is taken. I will continue this strategy even though using my web address is not my ideal choice; it helps promote the site.

David Gosse, A. E. namechk Retrieved 14/08/2009, from http://www.namechk.com/