Coding Languages

[Skyman]

I am a novice when it comes to web design. at uni i learnt the old way... hard coding html it seems to me these days that the web is moving away from this model (and it gets really complex when you start messing around with tables etc.) I am just wondering what languages i should try and learn and for what functionality? php? Java? i have recently been involved in desinging a fairly large site but i did all the work in html and another designer did the back end for me. mostly in php i believe. since it falls to me to maintain the site it might be handy to learn this language.

[Peter_AUS]

PHP is just another type of language, HTML is still the code of choice by most coders. PHP comes into play with using databases etc for names, images etc getting that info easily referenced. Also CSS for styles is more popular lately as well.

My suggestion to you is stick with what you know until you have to know the other. Because if you don't know it, it comes unstuck very quickly.

[ekstasis16]

Well first you have to understand the difference between HTML and programming languages like PHP. HTML is a markup language that is used to tell browsers how to organize and display content. It has no inherrent dynamic capabilites as a language, meaning it does not process code and perform logic. HTML is certainly not going away anytime soon, although it has evolved slightly into more strict standards.

XHTML is the current incarnation of the HTML standard, but it uses some syntax structuring from XML. XHTML is basically the same thing as HTML but with more strict rules about the syntax (i.e., all tags must be lowercase, all attribute values must be in double quotes, etc.).

If you view the souce code of various websites, you'll (hopefully) see a DOCTYPE declaration at the top of the page indicating which version the page is using - either HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, or XHTML 1.1 Strict, etc.

What this means is that hard coding HTML is still very much alive in a sense. The real beauty comes from mixing HTML with a web scripting language such as PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, etc. What that does is give you the ability to pass in external data to your pages that can be processed by the scripting language to generate dynamic content for the user. For example, this message board runs on PHP to pull in data from a database (such as MySQL) and spit out customized content which is displayed using HTML templates. This can get quite complex obviously and takes some time to learn.

As far as designing pages goes, CSS will change your life. What's been happening for the last few years, in a nutshell, is that web developers are using what they call Web Standards to create new methods for designing pages that are easier to design and update. HTML is only used to structure the content semantically, and CSS is used to style the content and control the layout. Tables are a thing of the past. This means that you DO NOT specify fonts, colors, sizes and all that jazz in the HTML page itself. You do that in an external CSS style sheet which can control tens, hundreds, even thousands of web pages. In effect, this lets you completely change the layout and design of a huge site by modifying a single file. If that's not a web developer's dream come true, I don't know what is.

If you want to learn more, check out these resources:
http://www.webstandards.org/
http://www.alvit.de/handbook/
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/Style
http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

[Sebastian]

If you want to make your design shine while helping with accessibility and making them easy to modify, then ditch using HTML for layout. Use HTMl strictly to define the structure of a document, and use a CSS style sheet to dictate how different aspects of the page look.

To make it clearer, you would put the < p > tag around one of your paragraphs, but you would tell the browser how to display it with instructions stored inside a style sheet. That way, the structure of the document, the < p > tag, does not need to be changed to modify the appearance of the page, you would simply edit the definition of the < p > tag's appearance inside the style sheet. This lets you make site-wide sweeping changes to layout by simply editing one or more style sheets.

HTML was never meant for layout, and is a very poor tool for it.

[Skyman]

This web standards thing is what i am working with at the moment. another person has done all that coding and i did the content and html. i am supposed to maintain the site but i don't understand the back end at all. in theory i don't need to but it would be a handy skill to develop.
if you are interested in the site it is http://forums.photographyreview.com/www.maristoz.edu.au not to shabby imho but i am definately looking to improve my skills and make it more effecient for me to maintain the site.

[Peter_AUS]

So you need to learn the backend as I said, one intertwines with the other.

[Peter_AUS]

If you want to make your design shine while helping with accessibility and making them easy to modify, then ditch using HTML for layout. Use HTMl strictly to define the structure of a document, and use a CSS style sheet to dictate how different aspects of the page look.

To make it clearer, you would put the < p > tag around one of your paragraphs, but you would tell the browser how to display it with instructions stored inside a style sheet. That way, the structure of the document, the < p > tag, does not need to be changed to modify the appearance of the page, you would simply edit the definition of the < p > tag's appearance inside the style sheet. This lets you make site-wide sweeping changes to layout by simply editing one or more style sheets.

HTML was never meant for layout, and is a very poor tool for it.

As much as I respect what you say, this last statement is actually incorrect. It is a layout tool, it was developed from the Newspaper Industry and if you look at the language used and then apply it to Newspaper you will see it actually makes more sense than it does the first time around. Editor use it all the time (language) and the short cuts like

tags are an example of that, instead of writing in paragraph, they used just the P and then when they wanted something to look a specific way they used pre for pre-formated (so layout like this). It has developed into a more complex structure as the web tools have developed and CSS is an enhancement on that now sort of redundancy of language although it is still heavily used.

No Argument or Debate on this as each has their own opinions of course so one tends to Agree to Disagree.

[Skyman]

and i thought html was invented by an engineer for use on an internal network as a way to reference pre existing document within the context of new ones.

[ekstasis16]

Skyman: that's right, it was. Tim Berners-Lee is commonly credited with designing the original specs for HTML.

From Wikipedia: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee)

In 1980, while an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." [1]. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first Web server called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).

The syntax structure for HTML was based on SGML: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGML)

SGML was originally designed to enable the sharing of machine-readable documents in large projects in government, legal and the aerospace industry, which have to remain readable for several decades—a very long time in information technology. It has also been used extensively in the printing and publishing industries, but its complexity has prevented its widespread application for small-scale general-purpose use.

[Sebastian]

As much as I respect what you say, this last statement is actually incorrect. It is a layout tool, it was developed from the Newspaper Industry and if you look at the language used and then apply it to Newspaper you will see it actually makes more sense than it does the first time around.

You and I must be talking about two different HTMLs. HTML never was intended for the newspaper industry, nor was it designed for newspapers. As HTML was revised the markup became more and more muddled due to the standard modifying tools to appease designers needing better layout, but it was designed as, and strictly is, a structural markup language. Its purpose is to tell you that what you're looking at is a heading, or a paragraph, or that it should be emphasized. HOW that is displayed never was meant to be described by HTML, and that is why the W3C is phasing out those parts of the HTML spec that are there for the purpose of appearance.

[Peter_AUS]

Sebastian no it wasn't intended for the newspaper industry it was based on techniques used by the newspaper industry by editior to instruct layouts of newspaper pages for the type setters to layout the page. Hence the different headings etc.

[readingr]

Having worked in the industry from a very early age - the answers are nearly there

In the begining there were several tag'ed laguages and then the Charles F. Goldfarb invented SGML which split content from layout and added strict rules in how content was created DTD's.

Before SGML there was Gencode used in the publishing industry created by William Tuncliff. From here Tex was created to enable the creation of mathematical formulae in books. They eventually migrated to SGML.

From SGML spawned HTML which mixed up content and layout again which has now made it hard to support large web sites so we now have all the variants of HTML and CSS and XML, XLS... which brings us back round to SGML type product.

SGML was heavily used in the Printing industry by the editors of the day so that it was easy for content to be divorced from the layout and the content would comply with a DTD. This is where FOSI was built to tell the content how it would be presented, similar to XLS today.

HTML to my knowledge has never been used other than for publishing web sites. Definately not in the printing industry.

[Peter_AUS]

I said, that HTML was developed from the way Newspaper where layed out by publishers using coding like H1, H2, H2, Sub Script, Super Script etc, to tell the typersetters, who had to do everything using metal letters etc, what the publisher wanted and where to place images etc. The whole idea came from Publishing. That is the point of what I said.