Web Design is an easy activity anyone can learn. From a single personal page with a few photos to a multi-paged business site designed for capital, web design is fun.
Web
Design is such an exciting and expanding field. With the
ever-increasing push for businesses and organizations to move online,
programming for the web is a job high in demand. The best part about all
of this is that it only takes time and a bit of patience to learn. With
web design there are essentially four areas that need to be studied.
These are HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
For all intents and purposes these should be learned in their
respective order, although some preference may be given between learning
PHP or JavaScript first as they aren't both required to function
properly and they deal with different sides of the server/client
interaction. The following paragraphs will give a brief discussion of
both HTML/XHTML and CSS, leaving JavaScript and PHP for another article.
What's the difference between HTML and XHTML?
XHTML
is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML. Stricter in the sense that
all tags must be closed, HTML doesn't require this, and cleaner in the
fact that XHTML documents are by nature more nicely formed. This might
sound trivial but it really does help for the code to be clean and easy
to read, especially when a programmer has to go back through paragraphs
of code to find a mistake.
XHTML is the bare content of a web page. If there's a page in which
the first sentence of a paragraph reads, "This is a web page", the XHTML
dealing with this part will simply state <p>This is a web
page</p>. The <p> </p> notation that is seen before
and after the quote is called a tag, this particular tag being the
paragraph tag, meaning it's used every time a paragraph is wanted on a
web page.
Tags are a required part of XHTML and will take a bit of time to
master; learning the tags themselves and how to use them properly. Tags
are used for anything and everything in XHTML, without them the code
will be invalid and won't display properly on a web page.
What are Cascading Style Sheets CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are tools used to make web pages more
attractive. If pages were added to a web site with nothing but XHTML,
there would be nothing but a white page with text on it. The content is
of course very important but never underestimate the presentation of
that content. Before XHTML, when HTML was standard there were a few
tools that could be used to control the layout of content directly from
the HTML.
Since the introduction of XHTML all of these have been deemed poor
programming practice since CSS can do all of these things and much more,
much better. Not to mention, using CSS helps keep the code clean, which
is something good programmers do in practice for it saves LOTS of time
when there are corrections or updates that might need to be made later
to the page.
Another great feature of CSS is that a style can be set for a
particular element in a single page, or can be written in a such a way
that it applies to every single page on a website, again making
maintenance and updating a lot faster and easier. With less code to
manipulate there are less chances for errors since there is less code to
review.
Building on the Foundations of (X)HTML and Cascading Style Sheets
XHTML and CSS are the core components of a web page. The XHTML is the
content and CSS is the presentation of that content. Once a programmer
feels comfortable with these two tools he or she can move on to
JavaScript and PHP to make the page dynamic and interactive for the
user!
Related Free Ebooks For Download
Blogging for DUMmIES
Building a Web Site For Dummies 2ndEd July2004 RR
Building Flash Web Sites (2006)
Building Flash Web Sites for DUMmIES
Building Web Sites AIO Desk Reference For Dummies - D. Sahlin, C. Snell (Wiley, 2007) WW
Building Your Business with Google For Dummies 2004
Creating Web Pages All-In-One Desk Reference for DUMmIES 2nd
Creating Web Pages for DUMmIES 8th
CSS Web Design for Dummies (2005)
Dreamweaver 8 For Dummies (2005)
Dreamweaver CS3 for Dummies
Dreamweaver CS4 All-in-One For Dummies
Flash CS3 For Dummies May 2007
Flash CS4 for DUMmIES
HTML 4 for DUMmIES 5th
HTML 4 for Dummies, 4th Edition
HTML, XHTML & CSS for DUMmIES 6th
JavaScript for DUMmIES 4th
JavaScript For Dummies Quick Reference
Macromedia DreamWeaver 8 All-In-One Desk Reference for DUMmIES
Macromedia Flash 8 for DUMmIES
Macromedia Flash CS3 for DUMmIES
Macromedia Studio 8 All-In-One Desk Reference for DUMmIES
Macromedia Studio MX 2004 All-In-One Desk Reference for DUMmIES
PHP 5 for DUMmIES
PHP & MySQL EveryDay Apps for DUMmIES
PHP & MySQL for Dummies 2nd
PHP & MySQL for DUMmIES 3rd
Syndicating Web Sites With RSS Feeds For Dummies Mar 2005 eBook-DDU
Web Design For Dummies 2nd Edititon Mar 2006
Web Sites Do-It-Yourself for DUMmIES
Wiley.Creating.Web.Sites.Bible.Jun.2008.eBook-DDU
No comments:
Post a Comment