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Part 10 |
Glossary
Part 10
HTML |
CSS |
JavaScript |
ASP |
PHP |
Cold Fusion
So you've probably heard these 4 letters uttered together more than once over the last decade. But what do they mean? HTML, stands for Hypertext Markup Language, which is a programming language used by web developers to create web pages. It's actually the one thing that all web pages have in common. No matter what web page you go to, under the hood it's based upon some form of HTML. In fact you can see for yourself by clicking the "view" and then "source" menu items in Internet Explorer. This will show you the raw HTML code that constitutes any web page you look at.
Web developers use HTML to describe what a page should look and act like. The language itself contains commands used to layout paragraphs, display images, play sounds, link to other pages, submit data and align page elements. This is where the term Hypertext comes into play. Hypertext is a type of document which displays interactive words and pictures.
Though HTML is the most commonly used programming language in the world, it's also quite limited in what it can do. In fact, HTML really isn't all that great of a programming language to use. It was designed in the early days of the internet as a tool to let document archivists better link related documents. However when the internet exploded into popularity in the 90s, HTML was chosen to as the de facto language of choice for web pages. Since then, web developers have tried to milk HTML for every possible drop of functionality. Unfortunately, HTML just doesn't offer the features that we want from a web page creation language today.
In today's web programming environment, we are forced to use other languages to fulfill the shortcoming of HTML. We use languages like JavaScript, VBScript, Flash and Silverlight to make up for what HTML just can't do.
There are new versions of HTML coming out which offer extended functionality and are less easily abused than prior versions. HTML4 and XHTML are the 2 most ubiquitous versions in recent years.
The use of Cascading Style Sheets is a method web developers use to write cleaner HTML. CSS allows web developers to apply style information to web pages without actually placing the styles commands in the HTML. For example if you wanted to make the background color of your webpage blue, you could write commands into the HTML itself and set the background to blue. Or you could write the commands in CSS, and tell your HTML page to use the CSS settings instead.
Generally speaking CSS greatly reduces the networking bandwidth required to download web pages and also makes web pages a lot easier to read for Search Engine Spiders. But the greatest benefit of using CSS in your HTML is the way in which you can change the look and feel of your entire website in seconds with a simple change to a CSS file.
If your web designer is not using CSS for your project, halt your project immediately and discuss with them why they are not.
Not too long after the internet explosion began, a new breed of web page was forming. A webpage that could perform marginal computational tasks on your local computer had arisen, and a platform to do it with was all that was missing. There were actually 2 main contenders for this battle, JavaScript and the less popular VBScript. JavaScript wan in sweeping popularity thanks to web site developers who insisted upon the browser independence which JavaScript worked. In a nutshell, JavaScript allows a web programmer to write little programs (often called applets) to run on your local computer. These applets would do things like validate information in forms you were submitting, or provide real time slideshow animations. JavaScript did this by manipulating the HTML elements created on a webpage in real time.
The down side to both scripting languages was the requirement that the client web browser had the runtime installed. A runtime was a separate program which housed the applets, and made sure they didn't harm the computer.
ASP.NET is short for Active Server Pages for the .Net Framework. ASP.NET is the current version of ASP, which is a web server programming language used by Microsoft since 1998. It uses a programming methodology called Server Side Rendering, which dynamically generates HTML code every time a page is requested. ASP.NET is a very popular web programming platform, and probably the easiest to find professional developers for.
PHP is short for Personal Home Page or Pre Hypertext Parser depending upon who you ask. What's important to know about PHP is that it is a very powerful and ubiquitous web server programming platform. PHP started out in 1994 as a personal project of a Danish computer programmer who needed a way to quickly generate web pages. It has grown to be one of the worlds most popular web programming back ends and runs on both Linux and Windows computing platforms.
The third spoke in the trinity web server programming platforms is Adobe's Cold Fusion. Created in 1995 by 2 brothers it offers many of the same features available in ASP and PHP. Cold Fusion was purchased by Adobe in 2007 and has become a very popular back end for websites.
Part 1 |
Part 2 |
Part 3 |
Part 4 |
Part 5 |
Part 6 |
Part 7 |
Part 8 |
Part 9 |
Part 10 |
Glossary
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