Design a Website class 1

Acronym definitions:

Web Browsers

A Web Browser is a software application that is used to view web pages. Plug-ins may need to be installed to a browser before it can display certian types of content, like video files, or flash animations.

Markup Languages

A markup language consists of text content and additional information about the structure or presentation of that content. The extra information is contained in tags. In most common markup languages, tags are keywords that are surrounded by angle-brackets, like this <example>

SGML

Standard Generalized Markup Language was originally used to share machine-readable documents between government organizations. It has also been used a lot in electronic documents used by the printing industry.

HTML

Hypertext Markup Language is the dominant markup language for creating webpages.

=XML

Extensible Markup Language is a markup language where developers create their own tags, so the tags may more accurately correlate to the content they contain.

XHTML

Extensible HyperText Markup Language is a middle ground between HTML and XML, where all the existing tags in HTML are applicable, but developers can make their own tags too.

Style Languages

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets are used to give style to markup languages, mainly html, xml, and xhtml.

Server Side Scripting Languages

Server side scripting languages compile and run on the computer that is serving the website. They allow for good security, and building of dynamic content that changes with a database, however when many users access a site at once the server may not be able to keep up with all the requests.

ASP.Net

Active Server Pages .Net is the newer version of Microsoft's corporate server side scripting language. The language is strong and object oriented.

php

php Hypertext Preprocessor is an open source server side scripting language. It's kind of squirrelly but it gets the job done.

Client Side Scripting Languages

Client side scripting languages run on the computer of the user. They depend entirely on the browser, and if a user wishes, he or she may simply disable these languages. I mainly only use client side languages as little tricks to complement stronger coding practices.

javascript

javascript is one of the most used client side scripting languages. Despite it's name, it is not related to Java at all.

Databases

Databases are used to store very large amounts of data. For example, all of the user accounts for myspace are stored in a database.

Microsoft SQL

Microsoft SQL is microsoft's database that plays nice with ASP.Net

MySQL

MySQL is a open source database that plays nice with php

Flash

Flash is multimedia authoring enviornment capable of mixing various multimedia types and creating animation. Flash files can be embedded into html pages, and once a user has downloaded the Adobe Flash Player, they can view flash content in their web browser

Java

Java applications can be run on almost any system, as long as the Java Runtime Environment is installed.

Image Media formats

psd

psds are photoshop documents. The files are very big and web browsers can not render them. You will generally want to create your image as a psd, and work on it in that format until it is finished, when you will save a version of that file that is more internet-friendly to be put on the web.

bmps and tiffs

bmps (bitmaps) and tiffs (i forget) are uncompressed image files that are very large. Save them to a compressed format before putting them on the internet.

jpg

jpgs compress really small. They are a lossy compression so lots of information is lost, and everytime you re-save, the document gets worst. That's why your work in progress should be a psd. jpg compression works best on photographs.

png

pngs are lossless image compression so they retain all the information of the non-compressed file, but are significantly smaller. They are not nearly as small as a jpg though. pngs can have an alpha channel for smooth transparency, however the transparency does not render correctly in Internet Explorer version 6.

gif

gif is a lossy or lossless image compression, depending on what settings you use, that can contain one color of transparency, and can be used for short animations.