Welcome!
Media and Web Development
ICOM-101 / MTEC-617
Dexter
He / Him / His
Artist working with Web Technologies
Web Developer @ SandboxVR
Office Hours - by appointment
What we will learn.
How to build web pages with HTML
How to style web pages with with CSS
How to add interactivity to web pages with Javascript
How to host a website with a custom domain name
What we won't learn.
Server Side programming
Advanced Front End Frameworks
Website builders and Content Management Systems
What are we actually building?
Simple Static Sites
Sites that act as a hub for content, but don't always host the content themselves.
We are less interested in building fully featured, rich media browsing portfolios, and more concerned with creating useful directories linking to content around the web.
Web Fundamentals.
Visiting a website
You type an address into the browser and hit ENTER.
Your ISP makes a request to a Domain Name Server ( DNS )
Visiting a website is a lot like calling someone on the phone. Every website on the internet has a unique IP Address, like a phone number, that points to the server where that website is being hosted.
The DNS acts like your address book and maps website names to website addresses.
If you know the IP address of a website, you can bypass the DNS completely.
The DNS resolves your request
The DNS looks up the domain name you have requested, and returns the IP address of that website to your ISP
Your ISP forwards your request to the IP address returned from the DNS
The website you have requested receives your request
Once a web server receives a request, it is expected to generate a response.
- A server at Twitter might dynamically generate your custom homepage and return that as the response.
- An API endpoint might calculate some data and return it in a machine readable format.
- A server hosting a static site may just return a prewritten chunk of html ( this is what we are doing! ).
Your ISP returns the response to YOU
The response might be a webpage, a media asset, or some data for the webpage to render.
Some key terms...
Server
A server is the computer that hosts your website. Servers make the internet work, but in this class we will avoid dealing with them directly wherever possible.
Client
The client refers to the computer that is visiting your website ( the opposite of the server ). All the code we write will be executed on the client.
Front End / Back End
Client Side / Server Side
The front end and back end refer to the client and server side respectively.
ex: "HTML is a front end language"
Week 1 Resources
learn.calarts.edu
I will track attendance and homework submission through learn. Make sure you have an account and are enrolled in this course.
Glitch.me
We will start using Glitch to write code next week, take a moment to make an account and get familiar with the UI.
Codecademy and Freecodecamp
This is where I learned to do this stuff. We won't use them in class but if you want to do some self directed study these are good starting points.