ABSTRACT
A brief overview of the web You probably already know about the web and how to use it but if not here’s the briefest of brief introductions. The web was the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, who came up with a common standard for hyperlinked documents across a network. He invented the acronym that we have all come to love, HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language). We link to an HTML document using HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol). Everything on the web has a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The URL for the home page for this book is
https://www.niklever.net/flash/index.html
‘http’ indicates the protocol, ‘www.niklever.net’ directs the browser to the appropriate folder on the appropriate server. Basically, the name is just a link into a big look-up table that finds the IP address of the computer. An IP address will have the form XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX, where XXX is a number up to 255. Although interesting, so far none of this is directly relevant to you as a developer. Where it gets more interesting is the document itself, the HTML page. In this to HTTP
will find the same file. All HTML documents have the format
<HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>A very simple web page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> This is the content of the web page. </BODY> </HTML>
Most HTML tags have the form<TAG>…</TAG>where ‘TAG’ is the start of a tag and ‘/TAG’ is the end of that tag. Most tags can be nested inside other tags. You may well have your favourite program for creating HTML pages: ‘Frontpage’ and ‘Dreamweaver’ are just two. But it is useful to know what is being created when you author an HTML page. Essentially you just create a text file. Whenever an image is added the image is not part of the document; instead a URL is created. This can be a direct link to the image such as ‘https://www.niklever.net/flash/images/masthead.jpg’ or alternatively in the current example we can just use ‘images/masthead.jpg’ which is a relative link to the file, relative in respect of the current page, https://www.niklever.net/flash/index.html. We look in the image folder and find the file ‘masthead.jpg’. When you create a Flash game you can choose to ‘publish’ the game. Figure 12.1 shows the ‘Publish Settings’ dialog box that is accessed from ‘File/Publish Settings. . .’.
