CIW Foundations Study Notes

These are a few of the essential points one needs to understand in order to pass the CIW Foundations exam (1DO-410). The three sections on the actual CIW exam are covered: Internet Fundamentals, Web Authoring, and Networking. After passing this first introductory CIW exam you become a Certified Internet Webmaster Associate. Then, you’ll decide what track you want to follow–CIW Site Designer, CIW Master Site Administrator, CIW Web Developer, etc.

Internet Fundamentals

• The Internet is a network of interconnected computers having no centralized control
• There are top level domains such as .COM, .NET, and .ORG and also country codes such as the “.UK” in this example of the BBC’s website: www.bbc.co.uk.

• Browser Caching – browsers store files from web pages that have been visited so when the user returns to the same page, the browser will not have to download the entire set of files again.
• Gopher – An early Internet text-based browse tool
• FTP – File Transfer Protocol – used for transferring large files
• Connection Speeds:

• Business-to-Business (B2B) – e-commerce transactions between business
• Business-to-Consumer (B2C) – e-commerce transactions targeted toward the public
• Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) – A common security protocol used to encrypt in e-commerce transactions
• Cookies are text files sent by servers in response to a request from a client browser. They assist in marketing and personalizing a site to a given user. Cookies are often used to “remember” a user name for login. They are normally not considered a security risk.

Web Authoring

• Common web graphics formats are
  • GIF – 256 colors, has no compression or is lossless
  • JPEG – 16 million colors, can be compressed, lossy
  • PNG – a replacementcreated for the GIF, but with 16 million colors
• Hexadecimal codes are six digit codes used to represent colors, wherein the first 2 decimals represent Red, the next 2 green, and the last 2 blue:

RRGGBB

• Dithering occurs when a computer renders a graphic outside its palette’s range of colors and attempts to approximate a suitable replacement color.

• An image in HTML code is referred to like this:

<img src=”myimage.jpg”>

• Frames
  • The <frameset> specifies the number, height, and width of frames. It contains either the ROWS or the COLS attribute.
  • The <frame> tag points to the actual html page frame to be framed
  • Example of frame page code with the left column taking 25% of the page and the right column taking the remainder:

• Basic HTML tags and their uses

• HTML 4.01 has 3 variations: Transitional (allows CSS and regular formatting), Strict (requires CSS), and Frames (used only with frames).
• Tables consist of three container tags representing table, rows, and cells  like this:

• Java – an object oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems. A Java applet runs on a server and must be downloaded by a java enabled browser.
• JavaScript – an object based scripting language adapted from Netscape’s LiveScript. The script is interpreted or run by the client browser.
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow you to create rules that format or style any HTML elements on a web page. The basic construct of a style sheet statement is:

selector, {property: value}

• XHTML is a reformulation of HTML that meets XML’s standards

Networking

• Protocols
  • IMAP – Internet messaging access protocol used by e-mail servers
  • NNTP – Network News Transfer Protocol is used by news servers
  • PPP – Point to Point Protocol used in dialup connections
  • POP – Post office protocol used by clients to store and retrieve e-mail
  • SMTP – Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used by e-mail clients and servers to send mail
  • TCP/IP – The suite of protocols used for Internet communication

• Ports to remember
  • HTTP – 80
  • FTP – 21
  • Telnet – 23
  • SMTP – 25
  • SSL – 443

• The OSI Reference Model  is a standard for network communications. It is represented by 7 layers:
  • Application
  • Presentation
  • Session
  • Transport
  • Network
  • Datalink
  • Physical

  A helpful mnemonic for the OSI Reference Model is “Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away.”

• Network Hardware
  • Hub
  • Repeater
  • Bridge
  • Brouter
  • Switch
  • Router
  • CSU/DSU
• Network Topologies
  • Bus – cable backbone with nodes
  • Star – nodes connected by cables that all pass through a hub
  • Ring – nodes connected through a MAU, clients pass a token around the ring
  • Mesh – multiple nodes connected to each other, data can travel many paths
• Web Servers
  • IIS – Microsoft
  • Apache – Open Source, UNIX
  • Lotus Domino

Source: CIW Foundations For Dummies, by Sharon Roark with Tom Devine