Just because Linux is distributed for free, it doesn’t mean the software is not copyrighted. Linux has been registered as copyrighted under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which is known in the programming community as a copyleft instead of copyright because of its nature. The GPL allows you to redistribute the Linux software, along with the complete source code, to anyone who wants it. However, the original owner of the components retains the copyrights to the software.

In the early days of the phone system, you picked up a telephone and talked to an operator who put your call through. As more people got phone lines, the phone company began to replace its operators with special switching equipment. When you dialed a number, your telephone sent a signal to the switching equipment, which routed your call to its destination. Such switching systems could handle more calls more efficiently than human operators, but they also opened the door to phone phreaking. Trying to trick a human operator into letting you make a free phone call to Brazil was nearly impossible, but tricking a mindless machine into letting you make free phone calls only required sending signals identical to the phone company’s. If you knew the right signals, the switching systems would blindly obey your orders.

The rest of this book contains a quick-reference for the core and client-side JavaScript APIs. It documents the complete core JavaScript API, covers the legacy (Level 0) DOM API, and presents a simplified view of the W3C Level 2 DOM API. Portions of that API not relevant to JavaScript programmers working with HTML documents have been omitted. The upper-right corner of the title block for each reference entry contains information that states whether a feature is part of the core or client-side API, and further indicates which version of JavaScript, which browsers, or which version of the DOM introduced the feature.

Before you build your Web site, you may want to consider its organization. While more than likely you have thought of many ways of organizing your Web site’s structure, you have probably thought about it from a navigational perspective. In addition to thinking about it from that angle, I would suggest that you also think about your Web site’s structure from a maintenance point of view. What can you do to make your Web site easier to maintain? What conventions will simplify the structure of your pages?

The result of this early structuring process will help you set a standard to guide your efforts. Now that you have your server up and running, it would be a good opportunity to consider a few of the issues involved. By no means, is this the only approach that you can use. Any thought-out logical system should serve you equally well. Many of the ideas presented here are used at accessLINK, inc., a small Web presence provider where I spend many hours of my day. AccessLINK develops several small- to medium-sized Web sites per week and maintains a few more on a daily basis. This article presents some of the ideas that I use for organizing our work. I will also address some other services, such as automatic support for personal Web pages, that your users will want you to implement.