Web Programming - The Very Beginning

The first question newbies have is “Why do you need five different things to make one web page?” Let's first talk about what each one is in simple terms.

XHTML

eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language is the language spoken by browsers like Internet Explorer or FireFox. XHTML tells the browser what data to display and how to display it. XHTML is very good at displaying basic web page data, collecting form data, and displaying links to other web pages. It is not so good at making the data attractive (formatting), and is really bad at talking to databases.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets is a collection of instructions to the browser how to display different items on the web page. CSS is very good at formatting data including colors, sizes, and special arrangement of data. It is also very good at quickly changing the appearance of a web page IF the XHTML has been written with CSS in mind. For example - the font size and margins for every paragraph in an entire web site can be modified with only a couple lines of code in a CSS file.

PHP

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a server side programming language. PHP is very good at giving instructions to the server about what to send to the client to view in the browser. PHP is also VERY good at talking to databases which can be used to generate web pages dynamically. For example, a photo club could have a list of events and contests coming up in the next year. PHP could check the date, and only display future events on a page. PHP is used to generate the HTML, and sometimes CSS and JavaScript that the browser uses. PHP is an open source programming language. Programmers from all over the world continue to contribute their own code to improve it.

MySQL

MySQL is an open source database. MySQL handles the storage and manipulation of data. In the example above about the calendar on the photo club site MySQL would be used to store information about each event like date, time, location, event name, cost, and event contact information. PHP is used to send a query to MySQL which might limit the data to only events in the next two months, sorted by date, that are free! MySQL is extrememely powerful database used by thousands of web sites. MySQL isn’t much use without a tool like PHP to help manipulate the data.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming language embedded within the HTML coding to provide instructions to the browser such as hide or display data based on user input, redirect the user to another web page, display alert boxes, move the user to the previously displayed web page or some other function. JavaScript is VERY good at making web pages more usable and interesting because the client can use JavaScript to manipulate the page after it is sent to the browser. PHP can’t do that. JavaScript isn’t very good at talking to databases.

This may not have cleared up any questions, yet, but hang in there. All will start to become clear in time.

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