PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Basic concepts of Web Design tecnologies

Basic languages to build web sites include HTML, XHTML and CSS. Don’t worry if you have no idea what any of these abbreviations mean, that’s why we have this page.
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.
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.
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.

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