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A webpage or Web page is a "page" or file of the World Wide Web, usually in HTML/XHTML format (the file extensions are typically htm or html) and with hypertext links to enable navigation from one page or section to another. Webpages often use associated graphics files to provide illustration, and these too can be clickable links. A webpage is displayed using a web browser, and can be designed to make use of applets (subprograms than run inside the page) which often provide motion graphics, interaction, and sound.
Webpages can be larger than fits on the screen. Except in special cases a page wider than fits on the screen, requiring horizontal scrolling, is impractical and therefore avoided: see page widening. A page higher than fits on the screen is more common and not problematic; it requires vertical scrolling to see all of it.
A collection of webpages stored in a single folder or within related subfolders of a web server is known as a website. A website generally includes a frontpage named index.htm or index.html.
A difficulty in designing and testing webpages is that they should be suitable for many browsers and browser settings and different screen resolutions.
URL
Usually a webpage has a more or less permanent URL, a permalink, and therefore allows deep linking. Sometimes it has only a temporary URL referring to a cache area. This may e.g. be the case when the page is the result of zooming and shifting a map. Sometimes a page results from a webpage by some action, e.g. replacing the content of one of the frames, while the new page does not have its own URL. Perhaps such a page, as well as a page with a form field filled in, strictly can not be called a webpage, because it is not on the web, but created from what is on the web.
Graphics
For embedding (transclusion) of an image in a webpage, see HTML element#Images.
The graphics file format in webpages is usually JPEG for photographs and GIF or PNG for other images such as diagrams, drawings, graphs, etc. The last two formats can also be used for photographs but are not as suitable for that purpose as JPEG (JPEG is lossy while GIF and PNG are lossless). GIF is used for animations, GIF and PNG for images with transparent pixels, PNG for images with partially transparent pixels (but this is not supported by e.g. IE). All these are raster graphics. There is also the SVG format: Scalable Vector Graphics. Currently more common ways to supply vector graphics are either with a PDF file, viewed either using a plug-in of the browser or a separate viewer, or with Flash. This is useful e.g. for a map, often a combination of a vector graphics layer and text, and possibly a raster graphics layer. This gives better results when zooming in than a GIF or PNG image (JPEG would be even worse due to compression artifacts).
Alternatively, on zooming in the server supplies a new image. In that case one can not download the whole map, unless perhaps piece by piece. See e.g. the links in Map#External links.
Also, as an example, compare the GIF and PDF province maps in South Holland#External links.
See also Map#Electronic maps.
Viewing a webpage
Since most webpages are mostly text, you can view them in any application that can read text documents. However, to view a webpage, as it is intended, one needs a type of software known as a user agent or better still a web browser, which is a piece of software specifically designed to view webpages. There are many different types of web browsers available with various capabilities and a wide range of supported platforms.
Creating a webpage
To create a webpage, one needs a general text editor or a special HTML editor like Microsoft FrontPage, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Mozilla Composer and so on, and a FTP program to upload the page to the web server. One can use the web browser to upload the webpage file to the server, but is not recommended.
Wiki is a special way to create or modify and upload webpages without FTP-ing or upload file, only filling a text formulary in a webpage. Wikipedia is an example of wiki technology.
Saving a webpage
When saving a local copy of a webpage, the web browser usually allows a choice between:
- saving the rendered text without formatting or images, and without indicating which words are links or what their destination is
- saving the HTML-file without changes, without images (view the source and save that)
- saving the HTML-file, changing relative links to absolute ones, without images
- also saving the images and adjusting the references to them accordingly; either a separate folder is made (IE, Mozilla) or the same is used (Opera);
Internet Explorer can also save the page including images in just one MHT-file.
The common web browsers, like Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, also allow you to print the currently viewed webpage or optionally "print" to a file which can later be viewed or printed. This has an advantage in that some webpages are specially designed using Cascading Style Sheets, or a separately generated page, to show both the text and target destination of links contained within the webpage. Likewise any images are contained within the single file.
For a short page another possibility is saving a screenshot (only useful in special cases). This shows links, but not their destination.
See also
External Links