With the explosion of the World Wide Web, many developers have moved into the new and exciting world of Web Development. Web development has three major parts to it: Web Servers, HTML GUI design, and Hyperlink Architecture. The server-side part of it encompasses the various transport protocols that are typical of the internet, such as HTTP and HTTPS. The browser-side focusses on the use of markup to display various textual and graphical components for an astonishingly large variety of uses. Hyperlink architecture creates navigable spaces of interlinked information that allow the user to browse, hunt for, and gather information.
The most important basic concept to understand in web development is the concept of ComplexityManagement. Creating a simple web page is very simple. Creating a large system of pages that is filled with dynamic information of varying longevity is quite another. As in all efforts to automate information systems, the goals of the system must be considered with the idea in mind that they will evolve over time. As users of the system experience the information and begin to use it for various practical purposes, it will likely come under various demands that were not initially considered. The reason for this is that what makes a web system useful and powerful is the links between the pages, not just the information in the pages themselves. This power becomes more evident as the number of links between pages exceeds the number of pages.
The user experience is a very fragile thing. A user who is well-oriented to the information can rapidly make use of it in any number of ways, but just outside of that context even experienced users can become hopelessly confused. The number of issues that arise due to differences in language, culture, age, and user intent can be daunting. Information is eventually all about human culture, in all its variety and depth. We all work from a cultural context of some kind, and we should keep this perspective in mind as we design any information system.
The infrastructure for all this, the Internet, is a source of wonder and frustration. No central authority keeps track of all the web sites that exist, so the quality of the sites and of the network communications that connect them all vary considerably. But that is where the freedom also lies. The Internet was created with the knowledge that communications are inherently unreliable, and that infrastructure is what the World Wide Web was built on. So it is sometimes very slow, and it breaks in many different ways, but it works well enough most of the time that we have a new world as a result.