There’s no need to fear Web development. Even if you’re new to Web administration, you can learn quickly. You might wish to get started by reading last week’s glossary of basic terms.
This week, I will examine four additional Web development terms and concepts you should be familiar with if you’re building Web sites or preparing to create more dynamic Web pages.
Four Web fundamentals
As a new Web administrator, you should have a solid grasp of four Web fundamentals. They are:
- · Cascading style sheets
- · Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language
- · Document Object Models
- · Forms
Let’s examine each.
Cascading style sheets (CSS) is one method of separating text formatting from the content, or data, of a Web page. (XML is another way of doing this). The system is called “cascading” because the set of rules defining which style is displayed in case of a conflict of two or more possibilities is called the cascade.
Web developers can define styles in a separate file—called an external style sheet—that is imported by a Web page, embedded in the page (defined between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of an HTML page using the <STYLE> and </STYLE> tags) or inline by adding a STYLE attribute to any tag. For example, <H1 STYLE=”color: green; font-size: 14pt”> will change whatever is in that specific heading tag to green and a 14 point font size. Creating an H1 definition in an embedded style on the page or a separate style sheet will change the definition of all H1 tags.
Should there be a conflict on a Web page between H1 definitions, according to the cascade, the specific inline definition prevails.
The CSS specification gives the ability to create many more possibilities for layout and design than HTML. For example, using styles, Web pages can add first-line indents, text boxes, and overlapping text. One problem that arises is that different browsers and even different browser versions implement CSS differently (no surprise there for seasoned Web designers).
By itself, CSS doesn’t really make a page dynamic or interactive. But the CSS can be manipulated by scripts that change styles on the fly in response to user input, so CSS can be a basis for dynamic and interactive pages.
For a nice tutorial on CSS, try Dave Raggett’s “Adding a touch of style.” Also see EarthWeb’s CSS Tutorials, which include help on using scripts to make CSS pages dynamic.
As you might expect, different browsers access the DOM in different ways. For a good basic tutorial, see The Document Object Model Tutorial.
Still have questions?
Never fear. Look for definitions to additional Web administration terms in next week’s article.