noted on Thu, 15 Jan 2004
Anatomy of a Web Site
With the general types of sites now described, what does a site consist of, semantically speaking?
- 1-n home pages (typically an index.html file)
- 1-n sections (typically represented as a directory of related files)
- 0-n applications
- 0-n discussion threads
- 0-n blogs
- 0-n wikis
- 0-n Browser-level assets (meaning all inline-viewable images, stylesheets, and javascript files)
- 0-n Plugin/Downloadable assets (meaning Java applets, pdf’s, Word docs, etc.)
It may be that some of you would think that movies or Flash files should be Plugin/Downloadable assets, and others think that they’re Browser-level. Honestly, it doesn’t matter that much to me. You’re both right. But very likely, everyone would agree that there are some things that are more Plugin/downloadable and others are more Browser-level.
So, what that list boils down to is this: If you want a web site, you must begin with at least a homepage. Having one implies, that there’s a section. Everything else is optional.
The term ‘section’ is interesting enough to be fleshed out a bit:
Anatomy of a section
- 1-n home pages
- 1-n sections
- 0-n applications
- 0-n discussion threads
- 0-n blogs
- 0-n wikis
- 0-n Browser-level assets
- 0-n Plugin/Downloadable assets
That list looks familiar, doesn’t it? A web site, then, is essentially a section that may contain a number of assets, including other sections.
I wonder, though, if some of the numbers could be tweaked. For example, can a web site contain a section made up of nothing but, say, browser-level assets? I suppose so, in which case you’d have 0-n home pages. But for now, I’ll leave the numbers the way they are, because they are typical for almost any site.
URI's
Tim Bray, in this article, already talked about it, really. A web site can span domains, or it may be within a directory or two of a domain, but not at the root of that domain. It stands to reason that the only safe assumption to make is a web site must have at least one URI, and that all assets, whether its a page or an image or a binary document, is going to have a URI.
Non-physical attributes of a web site
Also worth mentioning are such things like the author and last modified dates of a site. Such attributes are typically not referenced by URI, but are represented by markup within a representation. So, for the purposes of this model, they are not considered, because I don’t believe they will have an impact on the solution.
I’m not sure whether there’s any more to put in the model at this point, so let’s have a look at what falls out of this.