Website ABCs >
5) HTML, CSS and Javascript in 9 paragraphs
The purpose of this is to demystify this a little bit. You could spend days or weeks learning about this (and months or years learning how to put it all to use). This is just to give you some vocabulary and show you this isn't a total black box. This is designed to show you that it can be explained in English and in a simple manner if you can find someone who truly understands it.
HTML and CSS are in fact just simple databases in text form as opposed to tabular form. Most folks don't get that. I guess truth be told you could say that about all programming languages, but it makes a lot more sense to apply that concept to these two languages than Fortran, as they are in fact just holding data. These two scripting languages do NOT hold any words that call any commands behind the scenes like you might find in a true programming language.
Javascript is more of a programming language from that traditional perspective.
HTML and CSS are in fact just simple databases in text form as opposed to tabular form. Most folks don't get that. I guess truth be told you could say that about all programming languages, but it makes a lot more sense to apply that concept to these two languages than Fortran, as they are in fact just holding data. These two scripting languages do NOT hold any words that call any commands behind the scenes like you might find in a true programming language.
Javascript is more of a programming language from that traditional perspective.
HTML
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the language of the internet. It is a system in which "tags" are used to denote various sections of text. Tags are words contained within the greater than and less than signs. A closing tag typically offsets and opening tag and the closing tag has a / before the tag name. Some tags provide page structure and some provide information related to presentation of information.
A standard page structure looks like:
A standard page structure looks like:
- <html>
<head>somethign here but you don't see when you view the page </head>
<body>
The content you see in a browser window. There are typically tags inside these body tags like <div>, <span>, <br>, and many many others
</body>
</html>
CSS
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets (also referred to as simply "style sheets").
Arguably one of the most powerful and yet one of the most confusing and frustrating aspects of web programming are style sheets. Style sheets are written with a very specific syntax. In theory, style sheets are intended to specify decorative information about structural components and content in an HTML string. An example of the CSS for the Body tag listed above might look like:
Arguably one of the most powerful and yet one of the most confusing and frustrating aspects of web programming are style sheets. Style sheets are written with a very specific syntax. In theory, style sheets are intended to specify decorative information about structural components and content in an HTML string. An example of the CSS for the Body tag listed above might look like:
- body {
background-color:white;
color: black; //where color is text color
font-family: Arial, sans-serif;
margin: 0 4px 0 0;
border: 12px solid;
}
Javascript
Javascript as I'm referring to it here is a programming language that is designed to run "client side", where you, the user are the client in a client-server request and response system. (You, the client, makes a request to a file server, and you get a page of text back in response to your request from the file server). Javascript can be used as server side scripting in place of vbscript, php, pearl and others, but that is not the focus of this brief dialogue.
To the casual eye Javascript may look like CSS as it has a function(){ } format, but it is in fact a fully separate programming language. Javascript provides motion and animation to pages and it watches over pages as the user is interacting with them and it triggers events if/when the user does something that was trigger worthy.
Much of the problem in the mid 2000's was related to the fact that Microsoft did not want to use standards for Javascript that the other Browser manufacturers had agreed upon (Google, Apple, others). Thus, if you tried to use javascript in a website for client side use, you had to write two or more versions of code to handle each different browser that might be used to view the webpage with. To work around this a programming syntax called "Jquery" was created. It was not in fact a new language. It was written in very basic javascript and it was designed to provide a single syntax to handle all the different browser quirks. While it served a purpose, it created massive programming bloat and programming chaos -- and all of this chaos enabled Microsoft to hang on to their software monopoly for a few more years than they should have...
In the early 2010's Google Chrome finally became the browser of choice and at that point, most folks who saw the future just started building to Google (and Apples) version of JavaScript and I can only assume Microsoft's latest browser, "Edge", now works with that version of java script. I don't know if in fact that is the case because I don't care if my stuff actually works in Microsoft's browser anymore. It is that irrelevant to me. My primary background is in back-end web based business systems where I can specify what needs to be used for perfect operation, thus my disinterest for Microsoft browsers.
To the casual eye Javascript may look like CSS as it has a function(){ } format, but it is in fact a fully separate programming language. Javascript provides motion and animation to pages and it watches over pages as the user is interacting with them and it triggers events if/when the user does something that was trigger worthy.
Much of the problem in the mid 2000's was related to the fact that Microsoft did not want to use standards for Javascript that the other Browser manufacturers had agreed upon (Google, Apple, others). Thus, if you tried to use javascript in a website for client side use, you had to write two or more versions of code to handle each different browser that might be used to view the webpage with. To work around this a programming syntax called "Jquery" was created. It was not in fact a new language. It was written in very basic javascript and it was designed to provide a single syntax to handle all the different browser quirks. While it served a purpose, it created massive programming bloat and programming chaos -- and all of this chaos enabled Microsoft to hang on to their software monopoly for a few more years than they should have...
In the early 2010's Google Chrome finally became the browser of choice and at that point, most folks who saw the future just started building to Google (and Apples) version of JavaScript and I can only assume Microsoft's latest browser, "Edge", now works with that version of java script. I don't know if in fact that is the case because I don't care if my stuff actually works in Microsoft's browser anymore. It is that irrelevant to me. My primary background is in back-end web based business systems where I can specify what needs to be used for perfect operation, thus my disinterest for Microsoft browsers.
Summary
A webpage is just text that can in fact be read with the naked eye by those who understand the language. When using a website builder the construction of all of this text will happen behind the scenes. If you want to do something with your website that he builder does not support, there's a good chance that small changes can be made to the raw html, css or java-script by folks who understand these languages, but in general, I would suggest you try not to get too creative. Most of these tools now offer enough standard options that you should be able to meet basic and advanced needs without custom work.