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Learning Center
We offer a variety of learning tools to help you understand the various web programming languages available to you. Amongst such languages, you will find:
| HTML |
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| A markup language used to structure text and multimedia documents and to set up hypertext links between documents, used extensively on the World Wide Web. |
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| XHTML |
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| (EXtensible HTML) A markup language for Web pages from the W3C. XHTML combines HTML and XML into a single format (HTML 4.0 and XML 1.0). Like XML, XHTML can be extended with proprietary tags. Also like XML, XHTML must be coded more rigorously than HTML. Over the years, HTML coders have become sloppy, because Web browser software was originally written to tolerate many variations in HTML coding. With XHTML, coders must conform to the rules. |
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| CSS |
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| A style sheet format for HTML documents endorsed by the World Wide Web Consortium. CSS1 (Version 1.0) provides hundreds of layout settings that can be applied to all the subsequent HTML pages that are downloaded. CSS2 (Version 2.0) adds support for XML, oral presentations for the visually impaired, downloadable fonts and other enhancements. |
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| JavaScript |
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| A popular scripting language that is widely supported in Web browsers and other Web tools. It adds interactive functions to HTML pages, which are otherwise static, since HTML is a display language, not a programming language. JavaScript is easier to use than Java, but not as powerful and deals mainly with the elements on the Web page. On the client, JavaScript is maintained as source code embedded into an HTML page. On the server, it is compiled into bytecode (intermediate language), similar to Java programs. |
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| ASP |
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| (Active Server Page) A Web server technology from Microsoft that allows for the creation of dynamic, interactive sessions with the user. An ASP is a Web page that contains HTML and embedded programming code written in VBScript or Jscript. It was introduced with Version 3.0 of Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). When IIS encounters an ASP page requested by the browser, it executes the embedded program. ASPs are Microsoft's alternative to CGI scripts and JavaServer Pages (JSPs), which allow Web pages to interact with databases and other programs. Third- party products add ASP capability to non-Microsoft Web servers. The Active Server Page technology is an ISAPI program and ASP documents use an .ASP extension. |
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| .NET |
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| .NET introduced a new programming language environment that compiles all source code into an intermediate language. .NET languages are compiled into the Microsoft Intermediate Language (MSIL), which is executed by the Common Language Runtime (CLR) software in the Windows computer. The MSIL is similar to Java's bytecode, except that whereas Java is one language, .NET supports multiple programming languages such as Microsoft's C# and VB.NET. A subset of the CLR has been standardized by ECMA so that third parties can port non-Microsoft programming languages and create runtime environments for operating systems other than Windows. |
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| XML |
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| A metalanguage written in SGML that allows one to design a markup language, used to allow for the easy interchange of documents on the World Wide Web. |
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| PHP |
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| (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) A scripting language used to create dynamic Web pages. With syntax from C, Java and Perl, PHP code is embedded within HTML pages for server side execution. It is commonly used to extract data out of a database and present it on the Web page. NT/2000 and Unix Web servers support the language, and it is widely used with the mSQL database. |
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| Flash |
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An animated graphics technology and format from Macromedia. Macromedia's Flash MX and Freehand applications, as well as many other third-party authoring programs, generate Flash files, which can be viewed through a Web browser plug-in (the Flash player) or multimedia applications that access the player directly.
Flash files are widely used on the Web because they are very space efficient. Other movie files (AVI, MPG, etc. ) are massive by comparison. The reason is Flash's support of vector graphics images, which take up much less space than bitmapped video frames. In addition, vector images scale with the application window as it is resized. |
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