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ADSL is the new hot topic at braais so we discuss what it is and how it works.  We also take a look at the web and discuss how HTML and HTTP works - and prove that it's not complicated at all.
 

Are you still reading?

Good.  Sounds intimidating, boring and irrelevant to your life - right?  Not quite.  Gaining a basic understanding about the internet and it's technologies is necessary if you want to be a productive member of society.  The days where you could profess complete ignorance almost as if it is a social standing are fast coming to an end.  Very, very soon if you profess ignorance - you will be seen as ignorant.  It is not fashionable to be anti-technology anymore.

So think about this newsletter as a techno-fashion newsletter.  Anti-ignoramus of sorts.  And you are an honorary subscriber.  So spread the word: it's cool to be techno savvy. :-)

I hope you enjoy this edition, and don't forget to read the jokes at the end...but don't skip ahead now - else you might get a case of the ignoramus disease.
 

 
It's been a while since I've had a coherent discussion at a braai. 

Now don't get me wrong: the braais I am talking about are not the ones where a neat guy in slacks flip hamburger patties on a gas braai while taking little, polite sips from a lite beer.

Oh no.  I am talking about a South African braai. 

The kind where the girls prefer to be outside earshot:  Smoking mutton fat, scorching coals, torn jeans and bare feet, impolite conversation and lots of liquid "refreshments".   

It was quite a surprise therefore when one of this tribe asked me about ADSL, and he was not just pulling my leg either - he was actually waiting for me to give him an answer.  To my surprise, the other guys seemed to want to know more about ADSL too.

There was only one way to handle this, so I told them: "It is an abbreviation for Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line", and casually turned my chops over. 

They all nodded sagely, but I could see the fear in their eyes: that was waaay to much techno-speak in one dose. 

"Let me explain", I said.  To a man, they reached for the brandy and coke.

This is what I told them:

ADSL is a special telephone line and black box installed by Telkom.  The line connects you to the Telkom network permanently - 24x7.  If you stick a network cable into your PC and into the Telkom black box, then your PC is permanently connected to the Telkom network. 

You now choose an ISP to provide you with permanent internet access (to browse the web and send/receive email), ie between the Telkom network and the rest of the internet.

You can use your ADSL line to make (and receive) normal phone calls, and these are charged at normal rates; but you pay a flat fee for internet access per month.  You can also use VOIP to make and receive free telephone calls to any other party in the world with a similar setup.

An ADSL internet connection is more than 500% faster than a modem.  It turns modem Internet access from a conversation with a long dead zombie, into a dance with a stunning babe that just washed down a dozen E tablets with a thousand red bulls.  It's fast.  It flies.  It's beautiful.

Just then a member of the tribe interjected gruffly: "Must be bloody expensive!?"

Before the rest could nod in agreement, I continued:

Telkom charges about R 288.00 (Ex VAT) for the ADSL line and an ISP (eg Cozahost) charges R 229.00 (Ex VAT) on top of that.  For about R 517.00 (Ex VAT) per month you are connected permanently to the internet.

There are several connection options, and the cheapest is the 192Home ADSL version.  (This means the "thickness of the internet pipe" is about 192kbps, compared to other options going up to 512kbps.  For perspective, the size of a modem "pipe" is 33kbps)

Compared to any other internet connection option in South Africa, it is actually quite a good deal.  Once you have ADSL, you won't be able to live without it.

I was about to continue, but instead turned my chops over again.  This is a secret tribal gesture signaling to the rest of the members that a female is approaching and they better look after dinner - or risk burned chops and a long walk home.

So why am I telling you this story?  Well, because we have seen a 35% increase in ADSL users at Cozahost in the last few weeks, and everybody seems to be asking the same questions. 

So there you go, the short and sweet.  If the subject intrigues you, please see this online article were we explain the differences between modem, ISDN and ADSL connections.

The implication of the huge surge in households and small businesses going online is that the internet economy in South Africa is heating up - as we predicted.  This brings us to the next important subject - understanding how the web works...
   

 
If you had to explain the web to an alien in one minute, what would you say?  I thought about this for a while, and I came up with this:

It is a decentralized network of servers allowing anonymous access of standard encoded data files encapsulating multiple media types, layout and presentation information, user interfaces and API's to propriety back end systems and multi dimensional cross referencing - published and maintained by independent authors.

Blam!  The alien's head explodes.  Green slimy stuff everywhere.  Yuck.

Ok, that explanation is only good for assassinating aliens.  Let's try a more human approach instead:

Ever hear the expression "The total is greater than the sum of the parts?"  (By the way, that expression almost made my head explode when I was in primary school). 

It basically means that very complex things are often built from very simple things. 

For example: The most beautiful piece of music you ever heard is nothing more that a series of sound frequencies spaced with a little silence.  The Mona Lisa is just dabs of colored paint on a piece of wood.  The Vic falls is just drops of water falling off a cliff.  The web is just a lot of HTML pages linked together.

Using words to give justice to the Mona Lisa or natural wonders like the Vic falls are far beyond my limited talents - even if I live to be a thousand years old.  The web as difficult to describe in terms of impact and usefulness ("beauty"), but, even if we cannot understand the total, the parts are actually quite simple.

Be warned

Warning to sensitive readers: I am about to explain how the web works.  Please wear a helmet or at least wrap a towel around your head as you read this...because your head might just explode too.  Not because it is complicated, but because it is so astoundingly, elegantly...simple.

Hold on to your towel:

The web consists of two basic parts:  The reader software (web browser like Internet Explorer) and the web server.

The web browser contacts the web server and asks it to send a file.

The web server receives the request and sends the file to the browser.

The browser looks at the file and executes the commands in it - the result is that a page is drawn on your computer.

So far, everything is quite standard - almost all servers and clients work in this way, but where web servers are concerned, a special trick comes into play:

The lingo

The file (page) sent to the browser is "encoded" in a special language called HTML.  (Hyper Text Markup Language)  This means that special commands in the page tells the browser how to display the page: ie fonts, bold, underline and so on.  The language is not complicated at all.  For instance to write something in bold, the HTML file will look like this:

<b>bold</b>

A command is encased by two brackets <>, so <b> means start writing in bold until I tell you to stop.  The stop command is </b>.

The same principle holds for <u>underline</u>, <i>italic</i>, etc.

As a webmaster (someone who publishes web pages), you don't have to know how to write HTML because you can use software packages to "write" HTML pages for you.  It's as easy as using any word processor.  (Falling out of a tree is quantum physics by comparison). 

If you want to underline text, simply highlight the word and press the underline button - the software takes care of the rest.  (Good examples of HTML editors are MS FrontPage, Dreamweaver and the like)

Now just for fun, try this:

Open notepad on your PC and type this: "<b>Hello</b> <u>world</u>" and then save the file as hello.htm.  Now double click on the file name so that your browser will display it.  Congratulations - you are now an HTML programmer!

Just kidding.  HTML includes about a hundred commands and some of them are less obvious than the examples above.  The point is that an HTML file contains its own formatting commands which enables any browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, etc) to display the content. 

Because a HTML file is in text format, it is relatively easy to build viewers (browsers) that work on PCs, Apple  Mac, Unix, Linux, cell phones, palm top computers and so on...this means that an HTML page can be viewed by just about any operating system on just about every computer in existence.  Information is now usable by anyone on any computer.  Pretty powerful stuff!

HTML is cool

If you want to see what HTML looks like in the real world, go to any web page and click on "View" and then "Source" in your Internet browser.  The browser will then show you the HTML file itself.  Most of the time it looks pretty scary but that is because it was not "coded" by hand, but by a software HTML editor program...not because some genius programmer sat down and wrote it to make you feel intellectually inferior. :-)

Apart from formatting (bold, underline, fonts, etc) HTML also includes commands to link graphic files and to link to other documents - and that is where the real power and the real beauty lies.

For instance, to place your logo on your page, you can either code the following by hand, or use an HTML editor to do it for you:

<img src='http://www.cozahost.com/cozaimg/cozalogo.htm'> 

That line tells the browser to display an image ("<img") and the specific image to display can be found at "src=".  Simple really.  To include a link to another page, the HTML will read:

<a href='http://www.cozahost.com'>Link</a>

Has your head exploded yet?  Don't worry: as I've said you don't need to know HTML commands because you can use software to write HTML for you. 

Now you know the basic premise of HTML and you can see that it is not black magic or voodoo, so there is no need to check for HTML code under your bed before you go to sleep at night.  You can now remove that towel around your head too...you look a bit silly.

Talking the talk

If you look at the address line in your browser, you will notice that all web addresses are prefixed by "HTTP://".  Just like HTML is a standard language, HTTP is the protocol (set of communication rules) used to transmit the pages to and from your browser.  (The abbreviation HTTP means Hyper Text Transmission Protocol - a nice one for the braai)

HTTP is very, very simple.  It works around the principle of a URL - a Uniform / Universal Resource Locator - in normal person speak that means a web address. 

It is called Uniform or Universal because it means that every single one of the 18 billion web pages currently on the net has a unique and distinct name.  Without a URL standard it could be quite a bother to get the prices for Cozahost products versus the prices for nice big beach towels at Boardmans, don't you think?

Let's look at that URL thing-a-ma-jig a little closer, and let's use http://www.cozahost.com/default.asp as an example:

The first part (http://) tells the browser that the conversation it is about to initiate (to the server) uses the HTTP communication rules - in other words, it is mostly text.

The second part (www.) tells the browser that it should talk to the server called "www" in the cozahost.com domain name.

Finally, the last part (/default.asp) asks the web server to send the file (page) called default.asp to the browser.

Very simple!  of course the URL can get quite long if you have many folders with many documents, but the same principle still applies.

An import addition to the URL is parameters.  This means that after the url (eg http://www.cozahost.com/default.asp, you can place a "?" and a "&" with a list of parameters.  Parameters are extra pieces of information that you are passing to the server, normally so that the server can take a special account or obtain extra information.  Unless you are a programmer, you can ignore this bit completely, but just for kicks, check this URL out.  It includes parameters to Google to list the Cozahost page:

http://www.google.co.za/search?hl=en&q=cozahost

This URL tells Google to display pages about Cozahost (q=cozahost), searching only for English pages (hl=en).

Making things faster

Web pages can take a while to download because they are stored in a relatively inefficient (verbose) format: text.  Combined with this, a web page typically also includes graphic files, flash animations and the like.  In order to display the page correctly, your browser must download all these elements that make up the page.

When you browse a typical web site, you may find that you view a page, return to the home page, view another page and so on.  Each time the home page must be downloaded, with the site's logo that is probably on the first line of the page.

Naturally this repeated loading of the same thing is inefficient, so web browsers will store a recent copy of web pages (and graphics) on your own computer.  Now, if you move from the home page to another one and you return, your web browser software will know that it downloaded the main page just a few seconds ago and will display the copy on your computer to avoid having to download the full page again.

This is called local caching and it reduces the load on web servers, your internet connection and your temper a lot.  The disadvantage is that sometimes your browser might get confused about exactly how old a page is and will show you an old version that has since expired.  In these cases simply click on the refresh button (or the F5 key in Internet Explorer).

By "refreshing" a page, you are essentially telling your browser software that you are not satisfied with the old page and you demand that it reloads the page from the server - right now, dammit.

A proxy server does mainly the same thing - except that it does it for a number of people at a time, so if anyone in the group visited a page recently, the proxy will immediately return the local copy of the page.  This saves a lot of bandwidth, time, and...you guessed it: temper tantrums.

A new level of towel

Now that you understand about HTLM, HTTP, Proxies and caches - let's go on to the next technology.  It is called active scripting, or server side scripting.

We are now moving into the realm of programmers, and, as they say, you are known by the friends you keep - so we won't go into the gory details.  Suffice it to say that server side scripting (ASP, ASP.NET, PERL, PHP etc) are programs that run on the web server.  These nifty pieces of code will produce (write) HTML code on the fly when you access them.  They can check databases for information, do calculations, switch off a nuclear power station or just about anything you can imagine - except interfere with the stuff on your PC.

Server side scripting changed the web from static (never changes) web pages to dynamic (always changing) pages virtually overnight.  Server side scripting makes things like shopping baskets, Google, and so on possible...so they are largely responsible for the internet as we use it today...but don't admit that to a programmer...their heads are swollen enough as it is.

And that's it!  It's not so complicated at all and I'll bet you won't check for HTML or HTTP under your bed before you go to sleep tonight.
 

At Cozahost we help small companies and professionals tame the internet so that they can concentrate on making money.  We take care of the technical stuff so that they can take care of business.  Here are some of our products and services:
 

 
There was a very gracious lady who was mailing an old family Bible to her brother in another part of the country.

"Is there anything breakable in here?" asked the postal clerk.

"Only the Ten Commandments", answered the lady.

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A minister parked his car in a no-parking zone in a large city because he was short of time and couldn't find a space with a meter. Then he put  a note under the windshield wiper that read:

"I have circled the block 10 times. If I don't park here, I'll miss my appointment. Forgive us our trespasses."

When he returned, he found a citation from a police officer along with this note:

"I've circled this block for 10 years. If I don't give you a ticket, I'll lose my job.

Lead us not into temptation."

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While driving in Pennsylvania, a family caught up to an Amish carriage. The owner of the carriage obviously had a sense of humor, because attached to the back of the carriage was a hand printed sign:

"Energy efficient vehicle: Runs on oats and grass. Caution: Do not step in exhaust."
 

 
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Thanks for reading this newsletter and we hope you enjoyed it!  Please contact us if you have comments, suggestions or questions - we would love to hear from you!