I realize as I think about what I could and should write about for this post that my last post included a lot of undefined or explained terminology used on the web by developers. In this post I will be more interested in the jargon I used last time and how to better translate these things for people that may not actually know what they mean.
HTML:
hypertext markup language, this is the language used to build the content and structure of most webpages. When viewing your post through the text view you see a modified version of what developers actually write for building content. Above the text view textarea are a bunch of prebuilt buttons that allow the selection of common commands like “href” and “img”. These commands are executed by the browser to then build the meat of the webpage.
CSS
cascading style sheet, this is the “language” used to make the HTML look and feel different. I say “language” because it cannot live without the content produced in HTML and acts only as an accent to the HTML standard. Like accents CSS can give clarity but also can make things really hard to handle. take these “buttons” for example:
versus , , or .
All those buttons are modified using CSS imbedded in their HTML command under the name “style”. A whole bunch of cool stylistic things done on the web like size changing input areas and rounded buttons can be accomplished by way of CSS.
Javascript
This is what fundamentally changes the way HTML5 works from all its forbearers. The HTML used as the current standard has the above language built in. Unlike Java, which requires a plugin to operate in the browser that allows for some large security holes, slow functioning, and annoying code writeup, Javascript runs natively in the browser. This language allows for changes in CSS dynamically, calculations, and incredible functions that changes the way the web can and does operate. The only limit to Javascript is that it does not feature client to server communication, which means that whatever happens on the browser of the user does not actually affect the webpage on the internet. For that sort of functionality other languages like php, ajax, etc are needed.