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Creative thinkers love to find new uses for tools, uses that their makers may not have originally intended. These days, many architects and designers are finding new ways to use Web browsers, those ubiquitous software programs such as Netscape Navigator or MS Internet Explorer that are installed on most computer systems today to surf the Internet. Surprisingly, many of these new opportunities have nothing at all to do with being connected to the World Wide Web or to the Internet.
Some background on browsers
It is important to understand that, for all the fancy Web page graphics it shows us in our forays into the Internet, a Web browser is, in essence, nothing more than a fancy text-file viewer. It literally does nothing more than open up a simple text file, much like a word-processing file, and display it on a computer screen. What appear to be complex search functions are not done by Web browsers at all but by sophisticated search-engine software programs that exist on the Internet itself. Plug-in modules can further enhance Web browser capabilities to play audio, video, or animation files, but it is useful to remember that, at its heart, a Web browser is a text-file viewer.
Furthermore, a Web page can be thought of as a computer file comprised of unencoded or ``plain'' text that is formatted with additional special HTML tagging language. The HTML coding allows both text and graphic images to be displayed in various and enhanced ways.
The Web browser sees no difference between a Web page that it opens on your hard drive and one that it gets off the Internet. If a plain text file on your computer has either an HTM or HTML file extension (for example, TESTPAGE.HTM), it becomes a Web page; you can click on it with your mouse and your Web browser will immediately take a look at it. So Web pages can exist online on a server tied into the Internet or just as easily offline on your own computer system.
Although Web language (HTML) is fairly rudimentary (for example, <B>Headline</B> makes the word Headline appear in bold lettering), most people would rather not get into the nitty-gritty of writing directly in Web language. Fortunately for them, they...