What else makes a site by Joe so special? It’s the thought that goes into the site’s markup, making cleanly coded pages is an art form itself.
What usually happens
Usually, when your web designer reaches the markup portion of the process, they’ll make you pages in a Visual Editor (similar to working in Word) and they’ll hit the “publish” button and magically post your page on the web. It’s so easy, wow! Sadly though, “magic” pages are filled with errors and other forms of improper markup.
What should happen
Marking up a page correctly, applying a design to it and implementing page behavior is a multi-step process involving a couple languages. Deep (X)HTML knowledge is necessary to markup the information portion of any given document correctly, strong CSS knowledge is needed to efficiently apply a visual design to a page cleanly and basic JavaScript knowledge is needed in order to control the behavior of the document, handling clicks, page effects any many more functions.
How better, more thoughtful markup can be made
If pages are coded cleanly, CSS is controlling all the visuals and the JavaScript is written properly, you have a great page on your hands. This is a page that loads fast, works on all browsers and devices and is search engine friendly.
(X)HTML for Information
HTML (we can drop the “X”) is the language designed for marking up pages so they can go back and forth on the web. Over the years they upgraded it as far as 4.01. They’re working on HTML5 but it won’t be done soon. The “X” gets added when a newer, even cleaner subset of HTML (called XHTML) is used. I won’t get into it further than that.
Many items in the language have been dropped and added over the years, so it’s important to know how to not only make an HTML documents, but one that is proper by modern standards.
CSS for Style
CSS is a cute little language that has been around a long time, but is only now getting fully understood by most browsers. It offers a much more abstract and efficient way to control the visual portions of a document, managing colors, type and imagery. There are quite a number of bugs across the browsers that need to be avoided, but experience with the language allows you to avoid them easily.
The best part of CSS is that once the visitor downloads the CSS for one page, a copy gets saved to reuse on all pages, resulting in a much faster site.
JavaScript for Events and Behavior
JavaScript is like having a bomb onboard, if you don’t know what you’re doing. Many a page made by web designers have had JavaScript added automatically and I can tell you, the results aren’t pretty.
Javascript was created to manage the behavior of web pages. Over the years its been highly abused to the point that it ends up being disabled by some security settings because of its manipulative powers. Knowing that makes it imperative to make pages that while using Javascript, don’t rely on it for true functionality. Javascript should only be used to augment typical page portions, performing tasks like form validation etc.
More recently JavaScript has been put to use to send and receive information from remote servers. This opens up the ability to streamline things that would normally take a few page changes to accomplish, creating a richer, more desktop application-like experience on the web. If you’ve heard the term “Web 2.0”, that’s what they’re talking about. At the same time, the web is at a place I feel is a new beginning, now that so many of the technologies involved have matured into a standard.
Once we get into transmitting data, we have to connect to a web server. That’s where server-side coding comes into play.