What a fantastic task, It was really interesting being able to view the changes in webpage’s from the late 90’s to now….. It really amazes me as a fairly enthusiastic web surfer to actually say I didn’t really notice any change. It is true that many have speculated that webpage’s have changed from a linear design to an actual flash frenzy of limited words but brand icons and advertisements…. I loved viewing the Apple website and seeing the huge computers that were at the time so amazing but actually big bricks now with such limited hard drives ….. The Google website transformation amazed me because it was originally a project from Stamford university (I did not know that), but as the years progressed, it obviously became a hit website and a worldwide icon, and they advertised jobs on the website and many more advertisements were seen on google.com, it was noticeable that Google kept with their fairly simple brand icon as a logo and really only played around with fonts. I have Google as my home page as many others would and I am amused at the great Google icon images they come up with….. The guitar strings that strummed when the mouse hovered over it recently were wonderful and noisy. Today I loved the pretty snowflakes and the 3 eyed monster and bunny (So cute!!!). The dominos store website was pretty funny, it was just a blue page about the pizza and a slab of writing, and yep being a gen y I really could not be bothered reading it!!!! I liked how dominos just advertised silly little facts on their webpage like Perth being the 1000 store to be opened J and that they delivered a pizza underwater! WEIRD!!! I know I have been ordering pizza on line for some time maybe for 3 years, it is great to jump online and order my pizza and track when it is ready…. As I hate making unnecessary phone calls now because of the online ordering systems (I purchased mine and my partner’s iPhone online) not once did I actually speak to a human…. And my phone was delivered to my front door J Oh and I have a cool dominos app now where I can order pizza from where ever I am J too cool I say.
I also enjoyed completing the task where we had to view HTML code. In high school I have a little experience with designing webpage’s with HTML possibly because there were not as many free wonderful programs to design webpage’s….. I am grateful for the wonderful programs to help us design webpage’s without having to know how to write the codes, because it is very time consuming to write all the code to get a simple icon to move, let’s leave that to the programmers!!! Just to display a simple word requires another 50 codes to display the word on a webpage (OK maybe a slight exaggeration) but still!!!
I have not actually read online novels to experience the lovely hypertext phase as it was imagined. But I have created an e- portfolio where I used hyperlinks to send readers to information I wanted them to view if they wanted too. So I do appreciate the great idea of the hypertext. I know on many occasions I have been on a hyperlink trail and ended up on a completely different topic by just clicking on link after link, I know Wikipedia is a big one where I get lost, or YouTube. I would like to add though that as an early adolescent child I was quite excited by the goose bump series of books where the readers were able to choose where they wanted to go in the book and could chose the endings as such, I suppose for a writer this was also good because if they could not choose between themes they had in mind they could keep them all and include them all in the novel. I might be off track but this is exactly what I thought of when I read in week 3 that hypertext was aimed at allowing the reader to be in control of the book, and the reader could chose what direction or path they wanted by clicking on the hypertext branches.
Finally to wrap up this huge blog, do I actually understand what the World Wide Web is??? I am beginning to see that the world wide web is a program devised by Berners-Lee to enable many to many communication which was inspired by a notion from Vannaver Bush in 1945 ( Yes 1945) to have an easily accessible and internally linked repository of information ( Bush, 1945). Bush envisioned a workstation that could be used to store and access information in ways intuitive to the human mind. In order for Bush’s idea to be real technology needed to catch up so when the internet was developed it was possible for computers to link to a network and share data but unfortunately not all computers and files were compatible with each other so this needed to be worked on, Berners- lee had devised a plan to utilise the internet to have a large database of hypertext words stored in a file for people to access on the internet. Berners and his colleagues then worked on developing the tools to have an effective world wide web. The World Wide Web consists of a transfer protocol (HTTP Hyper text transfer protocol) A web server A language to display the information (HTML hypertext mark up language) and a web browser that is actually named the World Wide Web. The World Wide Web became the public face of the internet and has easily been misinterpreted as the Internet. But golly gosh it is quite a complex notion to understand…. I am getting there.... (SLOWLY)
