Notes

Web development - The Mile-High View

While using pace of change world wide web, it can be hard to remember that very few people actually keep up with the particular flood of new technologies, frames, and acronyms. Unless you usually are designing for web-related businesses, it's very likely that your customers will have no idea what "building a web site" actually requires, or what happens after you're done designing. In this article, Lets hope to give you a very high-level review of the Web that you can point a client to, so that they can understand what switches into a web site besides Photoshop or Flash.


Let' check here with a certain amount of history. Before any of this Web malarkey came about, you possessed computer networks. That is to say, men and women connected individual mainframes (because personal computers didn't exist yet) with cables so they could possibly talk to each other. PC's arrived, and offices started attaching a building's PCs with each other so they could talk. After that something really revolutionary happened: people connected one place of work network with another. Lo and behold, the basis of the Internet as we know it was given birth to.


At its heart, the Internet is a network of networks. In most cases, that smaller network may be the 1-4 computers you have with your household, which connect to the more expensive "Internet" network through your router or cable modem or maybe what have you. There is no "center" on the Internet, no overarching computer system directing everything; it's merely millions of small networks like the one in your house or office hooking up with one another. There are systems create to make it so that if your computer says "Connect me with computer XYZ, " it might find a way to make that interconnection, but those systems (think TCP/IP, routing, etc . ) are too complicated to express here.


So the Internet been with us, but the Web as we know it did not. The Internet in those days was good for only a few things: e mail, bulletin boards, and Usenet, among others. Then along came up Tim Berners-Lee with his description of a new acronym: PHP. HyperText Markup Language permitted the first web designers (geeky scientists) to create the first web pages. Visualize HTML like formatting with Microsoft Word; the words the student writes are all there, but Concept / HTML let you impart them with some extra meaning. HTML helped page creators to establish their text as grammatical construction, bulleted lists, numbered provides, tables of data, and more. Most importantly, HTML allowed page creators to link one page to another - the "HyperText" part of the name - to ensure related documents could be discovered quickly and easily.


As I mentioned before, the first users of HTML had been geeky scientists. HTML be sure to let them format their research paperwork, and link their paperwork to the papers they mentioned. That was about it; plain HTML doesn't have any real power to "style" a page outside of identifying what's a paragraph and exactly is something more specialised. So the Web was a coastal of text, without even an individual image in sight.


A few years after, competing ideas about how to provide pages some style were merged into a single process, CSS. "Cascading Style Sheets" let page creators produce their pages prettier by means of defining how the "elements" involving HTML (lists, paragraphs, etc . ) should be displayed. The particular page creator could currently say that all text within paragraphs should be red, this lists should be bulleted with little squares instead of communities, and to say how high or wide a certain article should be on the screen. Internet browser makers had added this specific functionality into their programs (like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) for a while by this level, but CSS did something radical: it separated this article to be displayed from the guidelines about how to display it. Using CSS, a designer could write two style bed sheets that made very different appears to be out of a single HTML site, without making any changes to the HTML.


And yet, rapidly promise of CSS, the item started out poorly implemented in a great many browsers, so that what viewed fine in, say, Internet Explorer 3 was completely busted in Netscape Navigator 5. So , instead of CSS, many designers (since it was right now actually possible to "design" a page! ) opted to make use of HTML's table ability to design all their content. The idea was going to use a website like an Stand out spreadsheet - make the copy and rows whatever girth and height you need, then fill in each "cell" on the table with an image, or some text, until you get what you need. This led to some attractive designs, but completely and totally broke the original concepts of HTML. In a table-based design, the HTML doesn't always have any meaning at all; everything is just a table cell. When the designer you are talking using keeps telling you that "table-based design" is a bad factor, that's why. Using HTML in addition to CSS makes a site in which loads faster and that actually has some meaning to machines (like Google! ), rather than giant spreadsheet. After all, would you ever try to make lady or write an article inside Excel?


So , we've got systems, HTML pages, and CSS stylesheets. How do they all aligned?


If someone wants a site, that they first buy a domain name. Investing in a domain name gives you the right to allocate the name to a particular personal computer anywhere in the world, of your own choosing. A head unit called DNS ("Domain Identify System") informs all of the tour's connected networks of where you pointed that name, so that when someone's computer says "Anyone know how to get to myfavoritesite. com? ", DNS know "Sure, it's at computer XYZ over there. inches


Computer XYZ, meanwhile, is running a program called a Website server. "Server" is a extravagant name that scares folks, but all it really implies is that computer XYZ is usually sitting around listening to their wire for anyone to say "Hey, I need the stuff intended for arborwebsolutions. com, " once it hears that, it will eventually throw that stuff on the wire. This is what people necessarily mean when they say you need to buy "Web hosting" - it is advisable to pay a company to run a computer with server software listening for your domain name, and handing out those files when an individual asks for them. You could function your own server right in your living room - plenty of geeks do - but which generally more responsibility than most people want to take on. Your monthly hosting charge does mean that whoever owns the computer is going to fix things whenever they break, and generally keep an eye on stuff for you. If they're a hosting company worth the money you pay out them, at least.


(Side take note: "Servers" aren't just for Internet sites. There are email servers which sit around listening for anyone to say "Hey! Get this notice to Jane Doe! ". There are file servers, normally in offices, that sit around waiting for someone to state "I need that display file from last week. inches Server programs are just about everywhere, and every time you have a computer system interaction with another personal computer, you're probably talking to any server. )


Back to the actual technology. While CSS ended up being taking shape, the Web additionally saw the rise connected with CGI, or "Common Entry Interface, " abilities. (Note that this is not the same SPECIAL as in movie special effects; which "Computer Generated Imagery. micron There are only so many mixtures of three letters around. ) CGI allowed the programmer to write a program this sat on a Web hardware and did things more complicated than just handing someone the HTML file or a CSS sheet. With CGI, you can fill out a "form" - those collections of text boxes that let you carry out things like buy a book with Amazon or log in to be able to Facebook - and do a thing with that information on the hardware - like telling May well in inventory to charge your card and postal mail you a book, or getting you to your home page in Facebook. CGI isn't a "language" in itself, it's just a technique, and there are dozens of programming which have that can talk CGI.


Hand in hand with CGI is the usage of databases. Databases let some sort of server hold on to the information you set in those forms, in addition to CGI can either store details into the database or obtain it back out as needed. Then when Froala Editor Free make an account at Amazon, they're holding all of your accounts info in a database. When you log in, Amazon remembers a number of information about you by tugging it out of the database yet again. Databases let you do more than merely accounts, though. If you've ever previously used blogging software similar to Wordpress, Blogger, Joomla!, or any type of of the dozens of other blog site types out there (that involves Facebook status updates or maybe Twitter tweets), you've applied a database to store your current articles. All a blog site is doing is storing your current articles in the database, and after that pulling out the most recent ones when someone comes to your website.


And so you've heard of fancy brand-new tools like PHP, or even Ruby on Rails, as well as Django? They're basically just different versions on the CGI / data bank idea. Sure, they're a lot more complicated than that, nevertheless it gives you an idea of what their designer / developer is definitely babbling about.


Yep, pretty much that's all there is into the Web. I've left out the metric ton of things, but I can always revisit that later. So , after you hire a designer to generate a site from scratch, here's what could possibly be basically doing:


Find an correct domain name and buy it (a challenge in its own right), and point it on the hosting server;

Take all of your current content (you did provide them with your content, right? ) as well as mark it up in HTML;

Write CSS stylesheets that will turn that content into a nice-looking website;

Figure out virtually any CGI / database points that need to be done, and set all of them up (usually called "back-end" work).

"That's so straightforward! " some clients will explain. "I could do that me personally! " It's true! You don't need a license to be a web designer, which is the way it was always meant. But when most people with this mentality start trying to learn HTML as well as CSS, they end up making nightmarish pages that fit MySpace to shame. Understanding the tools isn't enough rapid you also have to know how far better apply them. Owning a hammer isn't enough to make you a new craftsman, and hitting a few nails with it once or twice will not make you a master contractor.


One final note about Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is just a program that helps people write HTML and CSS. Froala Editor Free 's that - the Web does not involve Dreamweaver to operate; you can make a complete website in Notepad if you would like, as long as you save the HTML PAGE file as ". html" and the CSS file while ". css". Dreamweaver really does make things a bit less difficult by letting you "preview" your web site as you code and type things wherever you want in that , preview, but remember the blocks of HTML and CSS - text content using one side, presentation on the other. Dreamweaver has a hard time doing this; the sites it creates using people "visual tools" end up such as spreadsheets I mentioned previous. Any good designer should be able to create a beautiful site without ever pressing Dreamweaver or its ilk. That's why the design industry usually views Dreamweaver as a crutch for people who don't yet know what they're doing.

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