Web Applications

 

Webpage Source Code

What’s behind the fancy front?

Do you know what a website is? Sure ya do! It’s what you are on right now. There is more to a website than what meets the eye though. First things first, let’s look at what makes a webpage.What you’re looking at is what tells the browser you’re using (Chrome, Edge, Firefox, etc.) what the website should look like. In it programmers might sometimes leave comments or information about the website. It’s not always a great idea.

Go back to the webpage and right click on the webpage again. This time click on “Inspect” at the bottom of the menu.

Let’s hide and unhide parts of the website! When you hit inspect, it should have opened the inspect tool. In the top left of the tool you should see something that looks like your mouse. Click on it, and then click on a part of the website. Hit backspace and watch the item you selected disappear.

What did you do? When you hit delete, you edited your copy of the webpage’s page source. What you change, only you will see, because only your browser has access to that copy of the page source. To learn a bit about what would change it for everyone, check out the next section.

How Websites Work

Where do websites fly in from?

Out on the internet there are special computers called servers. When you want to share a website with others, you first set up a server and give it control of your website’s link (domain name). To have things for others to see on your website, you need to put webpage source files written in HTML and CSS (the languages programmers use to make webpages) on that server. When someone visits your website, the server will send it a copy of the HTML and CSS file. It is this copy that a visitor’s browser will turn into the website that they see. To change the website, you have to change the files on the server.

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