Read Write Speak

Journalism Next by Mark Briggs Chapter 1 blog

In Chapter 1, author Mark Briggs broke down the nuts and bolts of the internet. He dives right into the parts of the internet and computers that well… confuse the living daylights out of me.

Mark Briggs broke down

• The weight of files
  • How much you should send in an email
• Internet nuts and bolts
  • I found this the hardest to grasp, but once I read it over a few times I got it. Now I understand web addresses are the URLs and the IP address is basically the directions for the web server to get to the page.

From here Briggs began to focus on how things are shared across the web. He explained what an RSS is (Really Simple Syndication) and how you can interact with them.

1. RSS online that pops up when you log into a web page
2. Stand alone RSS that is downloaded on to a computer

“To understand the difference,” Briggs explains, “…Contrast the Hotmail-Gmail system with Outlook or Entourage, which you can use only on your computer.”

Briggs then explained how computers transfer files from one to another, through FTP or File Transfer Protocol. It is also the way that web pages can be published to web servers.

Briggs then expanded his horizon and went from web pages to HTML, which is the code that creates the web page.  If you know enough code, or have a little cheat sheet book you can customize a web page to anything that you want it to look like.

Then by discussing HTML, Briggs discussed the easy ways to get around major HTML hassles by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) or XML (Extensible Markup Language).

“CSS makes Web sites look cool” according to Briggs.

I don’t really understand what it looks like to do a CSS, but it lets you edit around the original HTML and fix problems within it.

XML “describes what data is, not how it should look (like HTML does),” says Briggs.

I now understand how the Internet becomes the Internet.