Web - definition of: if you "go to" a certain address the Web will put certain things on your screen.
This is, strictly speaking, a definition of the Web, not the definition. A more general definition would be "if you 'go to' a certain address, the Web will do certain things", one of which is likely to be putting certain things on your screen.
Terminology: On the Web, "going to" a certain address is called surfing.
"Web programming" is the process by means of which particular actions are associated with a certain Web address. A "Web programmer" is a person who gives the Web instructions. These may be of two general types: surfing, and editing. A web programmer who is surfing, but not editing, is called a "visitor". A person who is editing the Web is called a programmer. It's overlapping terminology but it is logically consistent.
Editing the Web means telling the Web what actions to perform when someone surfs to a particular address.
The concept of the day is "live editing".
Normally, to edit the Web, you would surf to an address and there you would edit the instructions that apply to a different address. In the case of live editing, you surf to the address you want to edit, and do your editing there.
This is not strictly correct. In one sense, everything the Web can do has its own unique address. Rather than being strictly a question of what address you need to go to to perform a certain action, whether it is surfing to a page, or editing a page, it is a question of how you get to one address from another. The root procedure for surfing to an address is typing the address into the address bar of a browser. Once you are at that address, though, it is usually possible to surf to other addresses by interacting with the features of that address you are at. For instance, the address might put a button on your screen, and when you click that button, it will take you to a new address. Typically, to request that the Web perform the actions associated with an address, you would surf to that address, or, that is, to a page, and then to edit the actions associated with that page, you would surf to another page. We introduce, here, the idea that a "page" can contain multiple addresses. A page, then, is some set of elements that are displayed on the screen, when you surf to a particular address, and then, normally, to edit that address, you would surf to a different page. The elements displayed on screen would be replaced by a different set of elements. In the case of live editing, though, the elements of the page - what you see on your screen, primarily - remain largely unchanged when you surf to an editing address. For example, typically, if you want to edit, the page you want to edit will disappear, and be replaced by a page where you "do" editing, whereas in the case of live editing, when you access an editing address, perhaps by pressing a button which is one of the elements of the page, maybe an editing interface will appear superimposed on the page.
Live editing is not, in a sense, a technical concept, that is, it is not, in fact, something to do with the basic mechanics of the Web, if by its basic mechanics we mean the "code" which tells the Web what to do when someone surfs to an address, and the protocols, which are rooted in the architecture of Web hardware, which give that code meaning, but rather is conceptually about the user experience. It is not about how we get the Web to do things, but about what we ask the Web to do. It may be true that in its early days the infrastructure of the Web could only move us from one page to another, but today it can modify the elements on a page, without requiring us to surf to another page. Live editing shifts our perspective on editing, from one that is focused on the problem of giving the Web instructions, to one that is focused on the context within which we wish to edit. We are looking, now, at a set of elements on a page. They are meaningfully related to each other in various ways. The meaningfulness of the page is not simply a function of the information contained in one or another element, but of the relative visual effect of the combination of various elements. For example, we might be looking at a group of images, some of which are from a trip to Paris, while others are about a visit to London, and we might decide to move those images around on the page so as to create two groups, one of pictures from Paris, one of pictures from London. Now, if you were to ask me to look away from the screen and give instructions to move this image here, and that image there, it would be a challenging test. That's a user experience. If, on the other hand, I could issue those instructions while looking at the screen, and at the group of images, the challenge of it is greatly reduced. It is true that some visible element on the screen is the most likely way to allow me to issue instructions. The question is, does this element replace the group of images, that is, cause them to disappear, or does it appear on the screen together with them? The former possibility is standard editing and the latter is live editing.
