Technical level: Basic/Beginner
|| Date: 2nd November 2002
||
Author: Nigel Peck
The meanings of abbreviations related to this topic
can be found at the bottom of the page.
Overview
There are two kinds of technologies used in web sites;
Client Side and Server Side. Client Side means the
processing of the technology is done in your web browser.
Server Side means the processing is done by the web
server; the computer that sends the web page to your
browser (e.g. www.miswebdesign.com is the name of
the computer serving this page to you).
In this article I will only be dealing with Client
Side technologies; the ones your web browser understands.
These include HTML, XHTML and CSS. Don't worry if
you have no idea what any of these abbreviations mean,
that's why I've written this article.
DHTML is a technology that allows programs to be
written which are executed inside the web browser.
I will be dealing with DHTML in a later article.
HTML
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language.
HTML is a way of labelling text so that a computer
can understand what it means and figure out what it
should do with it. HTML was created by Tim Berners-Lee
in 1990 and is now looked after by the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C).
In order to label text with HTML a series of "tags"
are used. These tell your browser what the text in
between them is. For example, the following HTML tells
the web browser that the text "HTML" is
important.
This document uses <strong>HTML</strong>.
The browser you are using now shows this HTML like
this:
This document uses HTML.
In most visual browsers you will see the text "HTML"
above in bold formatted text. If you are using a speech
browser then you should have been informed of the
strong emphasis.
By using HTML "tags" to "mark-up"
an entire document a HTML page is created, such as
this one. There are many tags in use that together
create HTML, a Hyper Text Markup Language.
If you would like to learn more about HTML (Technical
Level: Beginner/Intermediate) see HTML Help by The
Web Design Group.
XHTML
HTML has been succeeded by a new technology, eXtended
Hyper Text Markup Language or XHTML. XHTML is a big
part of the future of the World Wide Web. Through
a W3C project called "The Semantic Web"
the intention is that through XHTML and a number of
other new technologies web pages will be understood
by computers as-well as humans, allowing you to use
the Internet in ways never thought possible in 1990.
For an introduction to The Semantic Web (Technical
Level: Basic/Beginner) see this Scientific American
Article or (Added 5th November 2002) this BusinessWeek
Article.
For detailed information about the Semantic Web (Technical
Level: Advanced) visit the W3C Semantic Web Activity.
CSS
Although HTML and XHTML can also be used to tell visual
browsers how they should display the page, it should
only truly be used to show what the text is, not how
it should be displayed. To tell browsers how to display
the page, it's presentation, the W3C has created Cascading
Style Sheets, which we are going to look at now.
CSS provides the ability to control how documents
are presented visually, whether it is on a computer
screen, a television set, a printer or any other visual
mediums.
For example, the following CSS property is used to
set the font.
font-family:Arial, sans-serif;
With the above property the web browser would use
Arial if it was available, and it's default "sans-serif"
font if not.
A major advantage of CSS is that it allows a single
file, a style sheet, to be used for an entire site
which only needs to be downloaded once. This means
that download times improve for users and pages don't
take as long to load. You may have noticed that pages
on this site do not take long to display, that is
because all presentation for the site is done with
CSS.
If you would like to learn more about CSS (Technical
Level: Intermediate) see Cascading Style Sheets by
The Web Design Group.
For detailed information about CSS (Technical Level:
Advanced) visit the W3C CSS Activity.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations related to this topic:
HTML
Hyper Text Markup Language
XHTML
eXtended Hyper Text Markup Language
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets
DHTML
Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language
W3C
World Wide Web Consortium
WDG
Web Design Group
Related Pages
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