article: TLAs - Give Me A Break

ISP, IAP, IPP, IIS, ASP, JSP, PHP, CSS, SQL, DNS, DSN: give me a break!

The world of computing is easy. You just have to understand the language. As far as getting your pages on the web is concerned, the good news is that you only need to understand very little of it.

The language of the Internet is riddled with TLAs - that's short for Three Letter Acronyms. We'll talk about a few of them here in relation to web sites.

Internet Providers

An ISP is an Internet Service Provider. It is used as a wide-meaning term to describe any organisation that provides services to connect you to the Internet or make your site available on the Internet. It is far more commonly used than the two terms it embraces: IAP and IPP. An IAP is an Internet Access Provider, whilst an IPP is an Internet Presence Provider. Many of the early organisations which provided Internet services acted as both IAPs and IPPs - hence the more global term ISP which includes both, tended to be used.

Your dial up or broadband access to the Internet is provided by an IAP - Internet Access Provider.

People who provide the web space and related services for housing your Internet site are the IPPs - Internet Presence Providers. They give your site its presence on the Internet. In addition to providing the web space, they also provide security systems for your site. They also make it possible for your site to be able to run programs to assist in providing information to your web pages. A 'search' facility on a web site is actually a program run in the Internet Presence Provider's computer (its server) which searches the web site for the words you selected. Similarly, a Feedback Form can kick off a program on the server to process the information sent from the web browser to the server. Usually Feedback Form programs just reformat the data before saving it or forwarding it.

When you get a dial up or broadband account from your IAP you may also be given some free web space to put web pages onto the Internet. Usually this space has drawbacks. Generally these come in two forms. Firstly, you web page may be run inside another web page which has banners to advertise a sponsor's products. Secondly, you are usually not allowed to use the processing resources of the server which means that things like search pages won't work. Almost certainly you won't be able to use 'secure forms' which allow your to take credit card information and the like over the Internet in a data-secure way. Thus your IAP is providing IPP services but in a very limited way. If you are using the space for personal purposes this is often not an issue for you.

However, web space which is specifically paid for by you and used for commercial purposes generally does not suffer from these drawbacks. You can feel confident that your site will work as designed and be able to be expanded as your needs change. This is the kind of service you should be looking for when you put a business web site on the Internet.

Web Servers

The program that gets the web pages off your IPPs server computer is called a web server. Web servers are mostly run on two main operating systems: Windows based (specifically some version of Microsoft Windows Server) and UNIX type operating systems (such as UNIX and LINUX).

Over 50% of web servers running the world wide web are UNIX based, usually running the Apache Web Server. Unix and Linux have a particularly enviable reputation for not crashing unexpectedly - a frustration not spared to users of some other operating systems. Likewise the Apache web server is known for its stability.

In the old days web sites only had numbers as their address (e.g. 62.125.233.124). These were called IP Addresses (Internet Protocol Addresses). Then domain names were invented (e.g. www.mydomain.com). A way was needed to link the domain name, which could easily be remembered, to the IP Address, which couldn't easily be remembered. The solution was to have a computer called a Domain Name Server (DNS) to translate from one to the other--that's all that computer did! When you set up a website you set the DNS so that this translation can occur.

There is also a thing called a DSN: a Data Source Name. This is a Microsoft term. It is a way of giving a database a name (e.g. mydatabase). You tell the web server in which directory the database resides using its DSN information. Then in the database program you refer to the database by its name (mydatabase). 'So what?', you say. Well here's the clever bit: if you move the database to a new directory you only need to change the DSN information and don't need to change the database programs to refer to its new location: they will still refer to it by its name.

Web Programming

IIS (another TLA) means Internet Information Server. It is a Microsoft product and runs only on Windows Servers. Many large organisations running Intranets (internal Internets) use Microsoft products for this purpose. IIS allows the server to support Microsoft FrontPage Extensions: these are the special programs that provide facilities such as feedback forms and search facilities. It also allows Microsoft's SQL database to be used, and supports Microsoft's web programming language ASP (see later!). SQL is short for Structured Query Language or Sequel (which was originally just a way of pronouncing SQL). If the site you developed with Microsoft FrontPage doesn't work when you upload it to the Internet it can be caused by these extensions not being available on the server. This is especially true if your web space was provided for free.

ASP means Active Server Pages. This is a Microsoft Internet based technology which enables web pages to be designed which are highly interactive. Information you type into a web page as a web site visitor can be transmitted to the server ,and processing can then be done on the server such as:

• looking up information in a database to verify the information you entered
• collecting information from a database, creating a web page on the fly, and displaying it on your browser
• creating and processing shopping carts.

Systems such as these are known as client-server systems and have been in commercial use since the mid 1980’s.

On UNIX and Linux systems similar functionality is provided by JSP - Java Server Pages, and PHP (which stands for Hypertext Pre-Processor - probably an acronym devised after people had been down the pub - actually it stands for Personal Home Page - the inventor of the language used it to display his CV!). This kind of technology will play a major part in the development of services which will be available on the Internet. We live in exciting times.

Web Page Styling

Another TLA is CSS. This stands for Cascading Style Sheets. These have been around for a very long time. The issue was that although the standards existed, the different browsers and browser versions either did not support them fully, or they were were full of bugs in their support of them. It took a while to get things sorted, and today no self respecting web designer would create a web site without using them.

In the old style of web design each paragraph has to have a font (and other things) assigned to it. So changing the font meant that every paragraph had to be altered. This was very time consuming. CSS allows 'tags', such as paragraphs, to have a 'class' assigned to them. To change the font, its colour, or size etc only requires a single change be made to the 'class' and this cascades through the whole of the website. Likewise, tables can be formatted a lot better than before.

'Cascading' also allows these style rules to have an order of precedence. What this means is that 'styles' defined in one class can be inherited by other classes. If this sounds complicated it is because it is: most of the time things work the way you intended when you write a style sheet, but when they don't it can take hours to work out why--usually the cascading nature of style sheets is the problem (apart from having been an idiot in the first place in how you wrote the style rules).

Wrapping It Up

So what do you need to care about as someone who wants web pages on the Internet?

My answer is that you need to understand the type of web hosting you are getting i.e. make sure that your site is hosted on commercial web space even if you have to pay for it, and don't have the hosting providers banners prominently displayed on your site.

If your site contains flashing banners advertising someone else's products you need to ask yourself 'Is my site promoting my company or is it being used to attract visitors so that someone else's products and services can be promoted to them.' If these flashing banners weren't important they wouldn't be prominently displayed at the the TOP of your web page , they would be at the bottom. Putting it simply, if you're not at the top of your web page it's not your web page.

Well, now you have been told a lot of things you didn't really need to know.

So TVM for reading this far.

Oh, TVM means thanks very much.

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