Cloud computing is not new

In a previous life I was the principal of a school outside of Katherine which implemented what is now known as cloud computing. This was in 1996!!!.

In those days it was called Terminal Services which was an add-on to Server NT. Terminal Services was developed by Citrix and Windows NT had a poorer version of it. It was based upon the mainframe ideas of the 1950s. Basically each desktop had a small client application (called a thin client) which simply ran a screen display of a service running on a server.

All the programs ran on the server and all the data manipulation was done on the server with the traffic over the network simply updating the screen display on the client and sending back commands to the server.

This worked very well with a room full of computers able to run Photoshop via Terminal Services, through a radio network in1996!! Some people will still tell you today that it can't be done.

I remember talking to the techs at CSG about this in late 1990. They saw great potential in the use of Terminal Services over the internet, not just over closed networks. The only issue then was the speed of the Internet.

Neil Williams

Assessment 1

How is the World Wide Web related to the Internet?

The Internet is a collection of servers connected together through the telecommunication's system (read phone lines) which share data using a standardised format.

World wide web is one application which uses the platform of the internet. WWW involves the creation of of web pages (mainly using an HTML format) which are interpreted by browers on the individual client computers.

Other applications often involve a small client on the users computer which communicated directly with a particular server, these include email, MMORPGs, some financial software (stockbroking etc)

A growing area of use is the VOIP market where the telecommunication's system is being used for voice connection, though this time using the Internet rather than directly.

What is the primary publishing format on the web?

At present the primary publishing format is HTML web pages. Exact figures are hard to determine, however in 2007 Netcraft Web Server Survey found 108,810,358 distinct websites

http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html

It is difficult to see any other format taking over this depth of penetration in the foreseeable future (read 20 years) though blogs/social networking may surpass this in the medium future.

Include a useful hypertext link to any web site which lists the elements used in this publishing format.

There a a huge number of website devoted to the development of html and css code. These include for example:

http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com
http://www.web-source.net/html_codes_chart.htm
http://www.htmlfreecodes.com

and of course the standard site for all issues regarding

http://www.w3.org

Within the w3c site there are standards for every version of html including the following link which details HTML 4.01

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401

Which organisation's role is it to develop standards for the web?

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has developed this role for a number of years. They are concerned not just with HTML but numerous other standards used within the Internet. W3c was established in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee and his teams at Cern and MIT to develop standards to be used across the internet. It has now developed to become the authorative organisation. Membership of the organisation is open to all involved in the industry however the cost is very high, $8000 per year for non profit organisations and up to $70,000 per year for profit organisations.

List at least two popular web publishing standards described by this organisation?

Two of the many standard of interest to W3C are HTML in in many incantations (XML, XHTML, XHTML2 ...) and CSS.

What is this organisation's goals?

The W3C has these long-term goals for creating one World Wide Web.

• Web for Everyone


• Web on Everything


• Knowledge Base


• Trust and Confidence

http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

Why is validation a good practice for developing web documents?

Validation is the process of checking that the code is robust and conforms with the current standards. This means that the creater of the code can be confident that the majority of browsers will be able to read and interpret the code.

Validation also ensures that the code conforms to the programming standard. By doing so the code is clean and has the greatest likelihood to run quickly and well in all environments, now and in the future.