Learn about Web Designing Technologies

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.sitename.com is the name of the computer serving this page to you).

Client side technologies :

• HTML
• XHTML
• CSS
• JavaScript

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.

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.

The browser you are using now shows this HTML like this

My First Heading

My first paragraph.

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.

XHTML

HTML has been succeeded by a new technology, eXtended Hyper Text Markup LanguageXHTML. XHTML is a big part of the future of the World Wide Web. "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.

CSS

CSS Stand for Cascading Style Sheets.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 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.

JAVASCRIPT

JavaScript is a scripting language widely used for client-side web development. It was the originating dialect of the ECMAScript standard. It is a dynamic, weakly typed, prototype-basedfirst-class functions. JavaScript was influenced by many languages and was designed to look like Java, but be easier for non-programmers to work with. language with

Server side technologies :

• PHP
• ASP
• Lotus Domino

PHP

PHP is a scripting language originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. It has evolved to include a command line interface capability and can be used in standalone graphical applications.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.

ASP

Active Server Pages (ASP), also known as Classic ASP, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages. Initially released as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS) via the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack, it was subsequently included as a free component of Windows Server (since the initial release of Windows 2000 Server).

Developing rich functionality in ASP websites is enabled by the active scripting engine's support of the Component Object Model (COM), with each object providing a related group of frequently-used functions and data attributes. In ASP 2.0 there were six built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains the state of variables from page to page. Functionality is further extended by objects which, when instantiated, provide access to the environment of the web server; as an example FileSystemObject (FSO) is used to create, read, update and delete files.

Lotus Domino

Lotus Domino is an IBM server product that provides enterprise-grade e-mail, collaboration capabilities, and custom application platform. Domino began life as Lotus Notes Server, the server component of Lotus Development Corporation's client-server messaging technology. It can be used as an application server for Lotus Notes applications and/or as a web server. It also has a built-in database system in the format of NSF. From release 7, Domino server can use IBM DB2 system as its backend database.

Joomla

Joomla is a content management system platform for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework.

The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs,polls, website searching, and language internationalization.

It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database system to store information. Joomla is the result of a fork of Mambo. Released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Joomla is free software.