Web Publishing Essay, Research Paper

Rick Williams

Web Publishing

Before the advent of the World Wide Web, the means to share opinions and ideas with others easily and inexpensively was limited to classroom, work, or social environments. Generating an advertisement or publication required a lot of expense. Today, businesses and individuals can convey information to millions of people by using Web pages.

Web publishing is the process of developing, maintaining, and posting Web pages. With the proper hardware and software, Web publishing is fairly easy to accomplish. For example, clip galleries offer a variety of images, videos, and sounds. A sound card allows users to incorporate sounds into Web pages. With a microphone, a Web page can include voice. A digital camera provides a means to capture digital photographs. A scanner can convert existing photographs and other graphics into a digital format. A video capture card and a video camera can incorporate videos into Web pages. A video digitizer can capture still images from a video (Thrall and Winters 46-68).

HTML (hypertext markup language) is a set of special codes used to format a file for use as a Web page. These codes, called tags, specify how the text and other elements on the Web page display in a Web browser and where the links on the page lead. A Web browser translates the document with the HTML tags into a functional Web page.

Developing, or authoring a Web page does not require the expertise of a computer programmer. Many word processing and other application software packages include Web page authoring features that assist in the development of basic Web pages. Microsoft Office 2000 products for example, provide easy to use tools that enable users to create Web pages and incorporate items such as bullets, frames, backgrounds, lines, database-tables, worksheets, and graphics into the Web pages (Shelly Cashman Series Microsoft Word 2000 Project 2). Web page authoring software packages enable the development of more sophisticated Web pages that might include video, sound, animation, and other special effects. Both new and experienced users can create fascinating Web sites with Web page authoring software.

Works Cited

Shelly Cashman Series Microsoft Word 2000 Project 2. Course Technology. 1 Oct 2001. http://www.scsite.com/wd2000/pr2/wcl.htm.

Thrall, Peter D., and Amy P. Winters Computer Concepts for the New Millennium Boston: International Press, 2001

Zack, Joseph R. An Introduction to Clip Galleries and Digital Files. Computers for Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond Sep. 2001: 9-24.