The Internet: The concept of the Internet really is rather simple. It's a collection of networks - a network of networks - computers sharing digital information via a common set of networking and software protocols. Nearly anyone can connect their computer to the Internet and immediately communicate with other computers and users on the Net.
Clients, Servers, and Browsers: The Internet connects two kinds of computers: servers, which serve up documents, and clients, which retrieve and display documents. Things that happen on the server machine are said to be on the server side, while activities on the client machine occur client side.
To access and display HTML documents, we run programs called browsers on our client computers. These browser clients talk to special Web servers over the Internet to access and retrieve electronic documents.
Several Web browsers are available - most are free - each offering a different set of features. We recommend that you use the latest "Internet Explorer" browser available from the Microsoft Corporation. It's free.
Websites: Websites show you the information hosted by different servers on the internet from all around the world. You need a browser to view these websites. To visit a website you type in the address of the website in your browser's address box. For example to go to Therap Services' website you need to type http://www.therapservices.net.
There are special type of websites that are secure. You can know if a website is secure or not by looking at it's address. For a secure website you'll see an "s" after the "http" part of the address. For example Therap Sevices' secure website address is https://secure.therapservices.net. Note the "s" after "http". On a secure site the information passed between your computer and the site is encrypted and secure.
Electronic/online forms: Just like we fill out paper forms when registering at a hospital or for anything for that matter, now there are electronic forms that are used in software and websites to register for something. The main intention is to gather information about someone or something. We will see how to identify and work with these electronic forms.
For the rest of the discussion here, we would like to use the word 'form' to mean electronic forms. We will place the word 'paper' before the word form whenever we want to refer specifically to 'paper-forms'.
An electronic form could reside on a computer at an office. Or it could be on a server and accessible from any computer that has an internet connection. These forms that sit on a server and are accessed by many computers by using the internet are called 'Online forms'. Think of online forms as a type of electronic form.
In paper-forms we usually see a label and a place to write data that the data requires us to write:
NAME: _______________________________
The label could also be a question and the lined space next to it will be the place where the person filling out the form will put the answer.
The forms in online systems also have a similar concept.
The words 'User Name', 'Password', and 'Provider Code' are labels. And the boxes next to it each of them are the places where a person can type in information that the label asks for. E.g., the text TesterB is the User Name entered by a person. To access the box, move your mouse pointer on the box, and click. You should see a blinking vertical line inside the box. This is what we call a cursor. When you type the cursor will move with each letter. The cursor shows you the place where the next letter you type in will appear.
The places where we enter the text is in technical terms called a 'text box', and we in our documents often refer to it with just 'box' or 'text entry place'! A variation of a text box is a text area. It is larger than a text box and the user can see a lot more text being entered. Those who are familiar with email writing should know that the box where you enter the email message is a text area. We refer throughout our documentation to text areas as a comment entry box.
In our application the text areas are mostly used to gather a user's comments and hence the name. Also we ask the user to limit the comment to a maximum of 600 words and thus have a counter at the bottom of all the comment entry boxes that counts down to 0 from 600 as the user types.
Sometimes in a form the user has to make a selection. In those cases a set of choices are provided to the user. These choices may be seen as being of two types. One where you can select as many as wanted from the choices provided and the other where you choose one only. The difference can be easily seen in a form.The small white square boxes are called checkboxes. Moving a mouse over one of them and clicking on it will put a check on it. This marks the selection of the box. The box will have a label on its right to describe what is being selected. In the above illustration the IR Approve is the only one that can be seen as selected. However, any number of these boxes may be selected. A box that is selected already can be unselected by clicking on it once. This will visibly remove the check mark from the box making it appear empty again. This action is also termed as clearing a checkbox.
Besides the check boxes there are two circles beside the labels 'Yes' and 'No'. Instead of allowing multiple selections these selectors allow only one selection from a set, e.g., the real question here is being asked by the label Activate, and it has a set of answers the user can choose from. Either Yes or No. The illustration shows No as being selected. The selection is made by moving the mouse over the circle on the left of the label and clicking on it. That puts a smaller circle inside the original one, as can be seen in the circle to the left of No. If the user were to now move the mouse over on the circle to the left of Yes and click on it, the a smaller circle will be put inside that one and remove the one that was inside the one for No. These are in technical terms called Radio Buttons. In our document they are mostly referred to as Selectors.
When one selection is to be made, there is another way to do so - with the help of drop down menus. These menus list a number of options that is made available when the user clicks on the arrow pointing downwards on the right of the drop down menus. Before that the list is said to be collapsed. And when the button is clicked and all the list of options is shown, the list is said to be expanded.This illustration shows an expanded drop down menu. Moving the mouse pointer over choices will be highlighted in the same manner the text "- Please Select -" is highlighted now. Clicking on the highlighted choice will select it. It will also result in the menu getting collapsed and the selected choice being displayed in the collapsed drop down menu.
Just like a paper form can be submitted to an authority or passed around for review, so can these. But unlike paper forms that are handed over in person to another person or maybe dropped off in a box, these forms are submitted electronically using buttons. Buttons however has many more functions within forms that cannot all be covered right now. But usually the button for the submission of a form will have a label on it saying Submit or a more apt description of its function like Cancel or Reset.
Often, a form will require the person filling in the form to supply a picture for the form. The requirement here is to have the picture in an electronic format. The picture will have to be scanned into an electronic format or the picture needs to be taken with a digital camera that allows saving a picture in an electronic format. Then the image has to be saved with extension '.jpg', or '.gif', or '.gif'. This means if you save an image in a file named 'picture1', then the full name of the file should be shown as picture1.jpg, or picture1.gif, or picture1.gif.
The place where an image file is to be provided for a form will most often look like the one shown on the left. The easiest way to provide a file to a form is to click on that Browse button and specify the location of that file in the small window that pops up.
The window that pops up will look similar to this. This is one on a computer using the Windows XP operating system, and depending on the operating system that your computer uses, the look of the window will differ. In the window, the user will specify, or browse to find, the drive (and folder if the image is in a folder) where the image file is located. Then the Open button should be clicked, or 'Enter' (or 'Return' for some keyboards) button of the keyboard pressed. Then the location of the image chosen is displayed in the text box to the left of the Browse button. When such a form is submitted the image file from the computer is also sent through the internet along with the rest of the data of the form. This act of sending an image through the internet is also called uploading an image or image file.
A more advanced way, for people who consider themselves advanced users of computers; to upload the image, file would be to use the text box directly to specify where the image is.
The text box needs the location of the image file in the computer from where the website is being used. So assuming you have ideas of how to type out the location of a file within the computer's drives, you could use the text box directly. In Windows machines (computers running Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows ME or Windows XP), the location is written as such: C:\Photos\image1.gif where 'C' is a drive on that computer, and 'Photos' a folder name in that drive of the computer where the image file named 'image1.gif' was located. For more information on specifying the location of a file on Windows machine, please refer to the Help files of your computer. If you are using an operating system other than Windows, please refer to the help files or manuals of that operating system.