Google’s online book to demystify the Web

LONDON - Google has published an online book on “things you’ve always wanted to know about the web and browsers but may have been afraid to ask”, a posting on the company blog said.

The search engine has commemorated the 20th anniversary of a paper crucial to the Web’s development by producing the book.

Writing on Google Blog, Chrome Product Marketing Manager Min Li Chan explained that the book aimed to answer basic questions, the Telegraph reported.

How do browsers and the Web actually work? What is HTML5 - or HTML, for that matter? What do terms like ‘cookies’ or ‘cloud computing’ even mean?” he wrote.

More practically, how can we keep ourselves safe from security threats like viruses when we’re online?

“To help answer these questions, we collaborated with the wonderful illustrator Christoph Niemann to publish an online guidebook called 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web.

“This handy guide is for those of us who’d like to better understand the technologies we use every day.

The book uses HTML5, the latest Web language, and can be downloaded.

We built ‘20 Things’ in HTML5 so that we could incorporate features that hearken back to what we love about books - feeling the heft of a book’s cover, flipping a page or even reading under the covers with a flashlight, Min wrote.