Definition :
A website is a suite of files, mormally containing text, images, sounds and videos in different data protocols that will interact eachother to the web users clicks.
Most of the content that we will manage to handle in this course is made out of just text-code in the following scripting languages : html - JavaScript - PHP - MySQL

Many editors can be used to project an html page, such as Frontpage, Dreamweaver and many other programs or CMS suites as Joomla, Mambo etc , but this would not refine you to be a webprogrammer that deals with source code directly, you would learn to use a program to PROGRAM your website ...you might become by that a good program USER, but not a PROGRAMMER. If at any stage of your programming you want to correct any code error, modify or interact with any sourcecode of your webpage, you would have serious problems and in many cases you would have to throw away all your job and start again to reprogram your website.
In my early days I went through this bitter experience and this site of mine was made and remade for a quite a lot of times Frontpage 2000

We will then use in this course no program editor at all but just windows NOTEPAD, which is also at the end a program, but that is the purest tool I know to assemble source code for web files.

Frontpage for example besides being a quite expensive program, needs special extensions on your webserver to let it turn properly and generates several system folders that are rather difficult to customize manually, additionally its related ftp-publishing was not really standard in the past editions at my early days and maybe that did not change.

With a little effort we will then attempt to program in those languages and with our windows NOTEPAD we will assemble, copy and paste code on the website, after we have tested these files on our local pc in a suitable environment (localhost by AppServ1.5).
The following link takes you to a Frontpage site : Frontpage 2000
This is the same site re-made by using just NOTEPAD : Html & JavaScript
I am personally holding about 30 websites, 6 domain names and more than 16000 files on the web just by using NOTEPAD ... for a normal website you might need to handle 50 or 60 files and folders only. and a very limited disk space and webspace All you see in this website is just 1.5MB in my local environment, much less then the disk space I needed to install the environment itself (AppServ1.5.exe is 17MB)
Most of the files you see on the web are there ready to be copied and saved to your computer, then modify them and make them yours ... so let's use the huge internet resource for our Website.

By rightclicking a file you can : ...Copy & Paste . . . Check Property . . . . . . . Save objects . . . . . . . . . Stamp - etcetera I recommend you to read after all this eventhough you are not understaning 100% of this present page, later on many concepts will be cleared out and completed in an intuitive way. . → . . . ↓		So let's choose a website model and just work on its html structure to get our taste and feel on its passive Design for the Active part of it we will meet soon the PHP Parser... ...The Active Part of a website is made out of Server side code : ASP or PHP ...essentially if we say that a website is interactive, we mean that our webserver lets us use the PHP or ASP extensions and a database. The [Passive Parts] will be all those files that do not interact and have a fixed html output.
When you digit a webaddress (url) you are asking the server to show to you that resource, if that file is existing then the sever releases its data to your browser that will return to you the related result. If that file is not existing on that server you will get as answer an error message of file NOT FOUND (error 404) If you are requiring an interactive file such as ASP or PHP and if the server let's you use those extensions, then depending by the conten of the file that you are sending, the server will return an html output to the client's browser ... so it's clear that the same file can make different requests to the server. Question : How is that possible ? Answer : By filling in a form like the one that is included in this page, if you always input a different value in that form, you will get always a different result. From now on I will just refer to PHP as at the end we are here trying to learn to use this tool. The server program that mostly handles PHP is Apache coupled generally to a database server program named MySQL So when an http-user will ask such a server for a php-file a PHP Parser that is an imaginary analyzer of the code that is sent will read that request, check MySQL and Apache and will put together a result to hand it back as answer to the end user's browser. Members' Area [... a pratical example] You will have a website in which you want reserve the access to a certain Area to only users that have priororly registered to your site, or you can directly input into your site database their identifications DATA generally consisting in an Username and a Password So you will store into your site database their DATA as shown in the table herenext aside : Dunque al vostro sito hanno aderito i Sigg vittorio, Pinco, Ulyss e voi dopo l'adesione avete inserito nel database i loro dati. Then you have setup in your website an access file like the following : Club ...when the user will send the related form to the server, his request will contain the related strings... ...The Prser will analyze those will search the database for those values and if a record will be found.   User_Name Pass_Word E-mail vittorio ognissanti v.ognissanti@email.it Pinco Pallino pinco@pallino.it Ulyss NeMo ulyss@itaca.gk ... all this is CaSeSeNsItIvE and can be tested HERE