Just what is Web Development? Although the term “web development” is pretty much exactly what its name says, the phrase covers a much broader spectrum than just something to help you develop a web site on the World Wide Web. When one thinks of a website, what often comes to mind is a simple personal website or even a simple website for an online business trying to get off the ground. While both of these sites are put together with the help of web development, web development also refers to duties and tasks other than just designing the site.
While a personal website will generally have one web developer (usually the owner or someone the owner pays to develop the site), a large organization or business may have many web developers working on the site, each taking care of different aspects of the web site. One may be taking care of graphics while another takes care of plain text and yet another is doing the coding for the site.
Social network services like Facebook or MySpace are examples of organizations that have the need for many web developers. Because of the many needs for a large website, different web development languages are used. When browsing different websites for information, games or simple browsing, we seldom realize the many different web development languages that are being used. Here are some of the more popular web development languages and a short introduction to each.
- HTML means Hyper Text Markup Language and consists of a group of markup tags used to describe web pages. The markup tags used in HTML are different keywords surrounded by brackets (< or >). Each keyword represents something on the web page. The HTML tags are in groups of two: an opening tag and a closing tag. The complete HTML document, when used with a browser such as Internet Explorer, is what makes up a web page.
- CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and helps you, with the use of CSS tags, to control the look and layout of your web page. CSS helps you to control the text, fonts, margins, background, colors and overall layout. It is used frequently as opposed to older web development technologies
- Javascript is a scripting language that is used in HTML documents to allow them to interact more freely with other web pages. An example of what Javascript does can be seen with online games. Although it’s similar to Java, Javascript is much easier to use.
- PHP, originally called Personal Home Page, is a scripting language that can be embedded with HTML to make dynamic web pages. It runs on a web server and can be used with almost every operating system. Its main purpose is for server-side scripting.
- AJAX means Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. AJAX uses several different technologies including CSS, HTML, Javascript and more and together they make a web page or application that not only is faster but is more responsive to what the user wants. It also allows for easier integration with other web pages without losing the page you’re working on.
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