Client-Side Technologies (Week 3)

Today lecture was about a client side technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are examples of a client-side language. We are using these languages to build a website and to interact with a computer, so computers could display our imagination on the browser the same as we think.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee created HTML. Basically, HTML is a markup language. In the past, people used a markup language in the printing companies like newspapers. In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee founded W3C. W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium; this organization make a standard language so every web page could be viewed all the same on every computer and on different browsers. Moreover, because HTML is a plain text so we can use a text editor to edit it, such as Notepad, Notepad++ (for PC), Dreamweaver, etc. HTML tags usually consist of an opening tag and a closing tag, but some tags are stand alone. Also, an HTML file consist of two parts: a head and a body.

There are four steps when a browser display a web page (Weakley 2010):

• Download the requested page for example index.html.
• Parse or read the HTML code.
• Download any external files (images, style sheet, JavaScript, Flash, etc).
• Render the page according to the rules that it has about how to display text, images, Flash, and other elements on the page.

There are some basic differences between HTML and XHTML (Weakley 2010):

• Tag and attribute names must be written in lower-case.
• Documents must be well-formed.
• Attribute values must always be quoted.

Additionally, we also talked about CSS. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. CSS is used to define style of rules for elements of the document; it can be embedded, an external file, and inline. However, an external is recommended for the CSS. Another topic is the JavaScript. We use JavaScript to add interactivity to web pages. Google Map is one example of web pages that use JavaScript.

Finally, in the end of the class we practiced the HTML tags. There were four exercises that we need to finish in the class.

References

• Weakley, A. 2010, Client-Side Technologies, viewed 16 March 2010,<https://online.uts.edu.au/@@EB5EDC862776B77F20D3E084B38698D1/courses/1/95564/content/_344453_1/Client-Side.pdf>.
• Wikipedia. 2010, Tim Berners-Lee, viewed 16 March 2010, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee>.
• Wikipedia. 2010, W3C, viewed 16 March 2010, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W3c>.
• Wikipedia. 2010, CSS, viewed 16 March 2010, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets>.
• Wikipedia. 2010, JavaScript, viewed 16 March 2010, <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript>.