Before the advent of the World Wide Web, the means to share opinions and ideas with others easily and inexpensively was limited to classroom, work, or social environments. Generating an advertisement or publication required a lot of expense. Today, Businesses and individuals can convey information to millions of people by using Web pages.Web publishing is the process of developing, maintaining, and posting Web pages. With the proper hardware and software, Web publishing is fairly easy to accomplish. For example, clip galleries offer a variety of images, videos, and sounds. A sound card allows users to incorporate sounds into Web pages. With a microphone, a Web page can include voice. A digital camera provides a means to capture digital format. A video capture card and a video camera can incorporate videos into Web pages. A video digitizer can capture still images from a video (Thrall and Winters 46-68)HTML (hypertext markup language) is a set of special codes used to format a file for use as a Web page. These codes, called tags, specify how the text and other elements on the Web page display in a Web browser and where the links on the page lead. A Web browser translates the document with the HTML tags into a functional Web page.Developing, or authoring, a Web page does not require the expertise of a computer programmer. Many word processing and other application software packages include Web page authoring features that assist in the development of basic Web pages. Microsoft office 2000 products, for example, provide easy-to-use tools that enable users to create Web pages and include items such as bullets, frames, backgrounds, lines, database tables, worksheets, and graphics into the Web pages (Shelly Cashman Series Microsoft Word 2000 Project 2). Web page authoring software packages enable the development of more sophisticated Web pages that might incorporate video, sound, animation, and other special effects. Both new and experienc...
