Correct

Uncle Walter (1)

Notorious uncle Walter loves to talk about computers and computing, but sometimes his statement are not totally precise. This text contains 10 errors. Under each error a link is hidden. If you click on these incorrect parts, the correction will appear.

"My dear nephew, you want to create an internet business? Let me tell you all you need to know about it. Web pages are written in a language called HTML. It is essentially plain language and so-called tags. The tags tell the browser how to display the different parts. In order for an HTML page to be displayed as a web page, you must save it with the extension "htm" or "html", otherwise the computer will choose a different program to open it. Then you load your html pages to a special computer, a so-called "client". This is very often done by an internet service called "ftp", which is different from the world wide web. Don't forget to also upload all pictures, music files, links, and plug-ins your page is using to the client. Now people can view the pages when they type the URL of your pages into the text field of their browser. In that case, the files are send to that person's computer. When the user moves on to a different web page, the files are sent back to where they came from. If you want to show also animated pictures, like animated "gif"s, you need Java. Unfortunately, Java doesn't run on Macintosh computers. For an internet business, you need also to think about a payment system and about security. The most popular internet payment system is still credit card information, but since people are afraid that their credit card number and pin number are stolen, you should use a technology like SSL to create a "secure page". SSL means that only the first four digits of your credit card number are sent. Some very sophisticated sites also use encryption. Encryption could be either "symmetric key" or asymmetric key", where you have a primary and a foreign (secondary) key. In both cases, the problem remains how to exchange the keys, since if somebody would copy any of these keys, he could read any encrypted message to the person to whom the key belongs. Finally you have to make sure that your pages can be found by a search engine. For this reason, you should include many links to famous sites, like "Yahoo" on your pages, since the more such links you have, the more likely is it that the so-called "spider" of a search engine will find it. You have to keep in mind that the spider only has the fraction of a second between when somebody sends a request to the search engine and when the search engine responds to find your page.

Erich Prisner, June 2005