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Web Design Drives Me Nuts
HTML, XHTML, PHP, FLASH and CSS
Thought that title would capture your imagination, back to topic though. I believe that if you are going to create anything from scratch, the best way is to use good clean raw ingredients. To reference this to the web design world, It is far better to write websites in raw code, this not only gives you exactly what you write, it also cuts down on the amount of stale rogue code in your website created by using a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get editor). The downside to this unfortunately is the fact that in order to do this you have to have some imagination, as you do not get to see what your site will look like as you are generating the code. Do not despair though, you can keep checking back to see the outcome of your endeavours by using your Internet browser, but you will have to imagine how it all fits when your writing it. This is not always a bad thing though, as it will help you to better visualise how sites are actually built, and will give you a good foundation for what is possible.
HTML (hyper text markep language) which is the bases of web design, was designed as a marked tool. Many people confuse this type of language thinking that style and content are all one. HTML was designed as a way of marking up content with tags, the marked up content can then be viewed using a browser and the tags are seen by the browser. The browser is then told by means of CSS how to display the markup. So HTML should only be about the content on the page and have no connection to how a website looks.
XHTML is a variation on HTML, the X stands for extensible, it further defines the HTML language based on the principles of XML (extensible markup language), adding the benefits of XML to HTML. XHTML and HTML are somewhat interchangeable, both share common tags (as XHTML is based on HTML) but problems will arise it you mix the two languages. Quite simply XHTML was designed to carry on from where HTML finishes, seen as the future of HTML.
PHP is a dynamic scripting language used by web developers, this is capable of performing a vast array of functions, with the ability to output dynamic HTML and XHTML direct to the Internet browser from the web server, serving the web page to you. Examples of PHP could be a shopping cart, forum or chat room. This can also be the backbone to communicating with databases and is a vast proportion of the dynamic web you see today.
FLASH is generally a medium for displaying dynamic image and audio content, its primary purpose is the ability to manipulate raster graphics images and audio much like a video that can be interacted with. Some however think this is a good way to create complete sites, these sites act like one big intractable movie. For reasons beyond this book, FLASH is not suitable for complete websites for more reasons than I can shake a stick at (bad search engine optimisation, bad for screen readers, high bandwidth, difficult to maintain). Using FLASH is not strictly out of bounds though, but like my tip above everything has it’s place. Flash should be used for what it’s best at, movie type clips, games, intractable animation, not complete websites.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is the correct way to add style to content, this controls how a site is rendered based on the code inside the CSS file. CSS references the tags that we add into our web page, giving all the necessary information to render the page and its content how you wish.
So to simplify the above a little, HTML and XHTML are the structure for your content, the substance for your website, CSS styles this content how you wish to see it, and PHP is capable of creating dynamic content based on interaction with the website.
