1. The user supplies content to be 'altered'

Well, the first part of it all is you, good user.

On our main page is a text box in which you can enter text, and select the different method which you wish to apply to the said text.

Nothing at this stage has been sent to our server. All we know is that someone has requested a copy of the main page from our server. We wouldn't even be able to track it down, in fact. (Even if we wanted to, and essentially we don't want to)

Nothing happens, in fact, until you've entered some text, selected a voice, and hit the nice big button which reads "Change me!".

What happens at that point, precisely?

Well, your browser does the following things:

• Gets the text you have entered and stores it away in what is called a variable. Basically, think of it as a pigeonhole in the computer's memory. This one is called 'text', and it holds the contents that you've typed. But not exactly as typed. A few other things happen... spaces all become + signs (because web addresses are not supposed to have spaces in them). In fact, web addresses are not meant to have a whole load of symbols, so what happens is that the computer converts them into % codes. Basically, inside the computer, there is a magic code which tells the computer what letter it is working with. It's called the ASCII code, if you wanted to look it up. What happens is that any symbol or punctuation which isn't a letter, digit, underscore ( _ symbol) or hyphen will revert to its code. E.g. a ! sign is number 33. It will also go through a magical process where it will change from decimal to a computer thing called hexadecimal or hex for short, but basically means the same thing. Then a % is put in front of it. The ! sign would become %21 for example. This happens for all the characters which aren't letters, numbers, underscores etc.
• The browser then gets the method you have selected, and this goes into a variable called 'voice'.
• The browser then makes up the new website address. It starts with http://thevoicesofmany.com/text.php, as the basic address, which is the address of the text program which will handle it all.
• It then puts a ? on the end to denote that it is extra content, that the file requested is text.php, but that extra information is included so that text.php knows what's going on.
• Then it lists all the variables needed, in a variablename=variablevalue format, and puts an & sign in to split them up. We would end up with something like: http://thevoicesofmany.com/text.php?voice=binary&text=Hello+world%21. This means that I selected the binary voice, and put in "Hello world!" (though without the quotes).
• Having assembled the entire website address, the browser goes off and finds the thevoicesofmany.com server and requests the page.

In so requesting the page, the server will transfer control to text.php which will deal with all that icky ? stuff. To find out exactly what goes on, please see page 2 where we explain it all...