About this website
About this website
This is version 3.8.9 of The Art of Music website, mostly hand-coded – in XHTML using Dreamweaver (MX, and later 8), preprocessed by PHP and connected to a MySQL database. Positioning, formatting and layout have all been done with CSS for faster downloading and ease of maintenance. Even the drop-down menu bar is text-based, using only two or three images, style sheets and 1k of JavaScript. It all degrades gracefully for older browsers, including Netscape 4.8.
Dictionary of internet terminology
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
Cascading Style Sheets: a way of styling a whole website with minimal markup (see HTML). Style sheets can define the look of anything on a web page, from heading and paragraph styles to tables. By including references to images, style sheets can make a simple text-based web page into one in which every element is positioned and graphics and images applied that don't exist in the HTML. See csszengarden.com for a fascinating demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS-based design. Designers use pre-existing HTML coding and create their design simply through the use of style sheets. By studying the CSS, other designers can understand better how to separate design from content. |
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domain name |
Strictly speaking this is the address of any computer on the internet. More often, though, it refers to the hostname, providing a memorable name than a numeric IP address. The domain name example.com, for example, consists of a top-level domain "com", preceded by a dot ("period" in American English), preceded by the label "example". A hostname consists of a series of DNS labels separated by dots. Contact us if you would like us to design a website and obtain a suitable domain name for you. |
e-mail address encryption |
Spammers use computers to harvest e-mail addresses from websites in order to send them unwanted e-mails for undesired products, or to "phish" for your banking details. JavaScript coding for cloaking of email addresses helps to avoid them being picked up by spammers. The cloaking downgrades gracefully if you do not have JavaScript enabled as you will still be able to see the address – although you will need to copy and paste it into your browser. All the email addresses on this website have been encrypted (for example, spamblocktest(at)theartofmusic.co.uk). In order to product our clients we also encrypt e-mail addresses placed on websites that we build. |
ecological hosting |
For solar-powered web hosting you could try Ecological Hosting by Athenaeum. |
HyperText Mark-up Language: the language of the web. Ordinary text is used, but it is "marked up" to enable the web browser to perform a specific function. Surrounding a piece of text with the <em> tag will usually make it appear in italics (for example, "<em>this is italic text</em>" shows up in your browser as "this is italic text"). Surrounding a piece of text with the <title> tag in the <head> section of the page will show up on the top left of the browser as the title of the page (for example, the title of this page appears in the underlying HTML as "<title>About this website</title>" Right-click on the page to "View (Page) Source" and then look near the top of the code for "<title>" to see it in context. See CSS for more information about how the use of style sheets both makes text mark-up easier to control from the point of view of both the user and the programmer. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides definitions for this mark-up code, together with validation tools for both HTML and CSS in order to help web developers write valid code that will work as consistently as possible in all browsers (although there are notably a number of problems with one proprietary browser in particular). |
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IP address |
Internet Protocol Address: Every computer connected to the internet needs a unique address known as an IP address, as this provides a unique identification for a computer and the network to which it belongs. The IP address is a numeric address written as a set of four numbers separated by dots (for example 192.212.38.15) and can be static or dynamic. A static IP address would always be the same every time you make a connection; a dynamic IP address changes every time you connect. Your IP address is: 38.107.191.82 |
Linux |
There is a fast-growing user base for this open-source operating system. Ubuntu is especially recommended for ease of use. |
MySQL |
One of the Structured Query Language database constructs. This one is open-source, and is an ideal partner for PHP. |
operating systems |
Although the most used OS is Microsoft Windows (in many variants), there are others! The Mac OS is also widely used, as is the open-source Linux (the servers our websites are hosted on):
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PHP HyperText Processor (it's a recursive acronym). An open-source way of delivering dynamic pages for a website. This is a server-based method, as opposed to JavaScript which is client-based (the changes take place before the page is sent to the user's browser; this is in contrast to JavaScript, where changes take place in response to what the user does). A useful, well-written book for learning about PHP and MySQL is Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 by David Powers - available now from Amazon - which takes you through the stages necessary to convert a static site to a dynamic one, and in gentle, easy stages. |
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time |
Local:
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top-level domain |
This is the last DNS label in a hostname, following the final dot. There are three types: country code, generic and infrastructure. Examples of country code TLDs include AU (Australia) CA (Canada, DE (Germany), FR (France), NZ (New Zealand), UK (United Kingdom), US (United States), ZA (South Africa). The country code SC is assigned to the Seychelles, so the proposed TLD for Scotland is SCO; that for Wales is CYM. Examples of generic (gTLDs) include AC (academic), ASIA (Asia), CO (company), COM (commercial), COOP (co-operatives), ME (personal sites), NAME (personal sites), NET (internet businesses), ORG (non-commercial organisations). There is only one official infrastructure TLD: ARP (used exclusively for Internet-infrastructure purposes). ROOT has been seen but is not recognised. |
user agent |
You are using the following User Agent: |
web hosting |
Data for each website have to be hosted on a special kind of computer called a server (in fact any computer is capable of being a server). |
XHTML |
eXtensible HyperText Mark-up Language: a more developed version of HTML with stricter protocols. |
Web hosting
This website is hosted by www.1and1.co.uk. Check for your own domain name here:
