Web Design is such an exciting and expanding field. With the ever-increasing push for businesses and organizations to move online, programming for the web is a job high in demand. The best part about all of this is that it only takes time and a bit of patience to learn. With web design there are essentially four areas that need to be studied. These are HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP.
For all intents and purposes these should be learned in their respective order, although some preference may be given between learning PHP or JavaScript first as they aren't both required to function properly and they deal with different sides of the server/client interaction. The following paragraphs will give a brief discussion of both HTML/XHTML and CSS, leaving JavaScript and PHP for another article.
What is HTML/XHTML?
What's the difference between HTML and XHTML?
XHTML is a stricter and cleaner version of HTML. Stricter in the sense that all tags must be closed, HTML doesn't require this, and cleaner in the fact that XHTML documents are by nature more nicely formed. This might sound trivial but it really does help for the code to be clean and easy to read, especially when a programmer has to go back through paragraphs of code to find a mistake.
XHTML is the bare content of a web page. If there's a page in which the first sentence of a paragraph reads, "This is a web page", the XHTML dealing with this part will simply state <p>This is a web page</p>. The <p> </p> notation that is seen before and after the quote is called a tag, this particular tag being the paragraph tag, meaning it's used every time a paragraph is wanted on a web page.
Tags are a required part of XHTML and will take a bit of time to master; learning the tags themselves and how to use them properly. Tags are used for anything and everything in XHTML, without them the code will be invalid and won't display properly on a web page. A great place for learning XHTML is at the online w3schools. Here you will fill find all kinds of free tutorials pertaining to web design and specifically HTML/XHTML.
What are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)?
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, are tools used to make web pages more attractive. If pages were added to a web site with nothing but XHTML, there would be nothing but a white page with text on it. The content is of course very important but never underestimate the presentation of that content. Before XHTML, when HTML was standard there were a few tools that could be used to control the layout of content directly from the HTML.
Since the introduction of XHTML all of these have been deemed poor programming practice since CSS can do all of these things and much more, much better. Not to mention, using CSS helps keep the code clean, which is something good programmers do in practice for it saves LOTS of time when there are corrections or updates that might need to be made later to the page.
Another great feature of CSS is that a style can be set for a particular element in a single page, or can be written in a such a way that it applies to every single page on a website, again making maintenance and updating a lot faster and easier. With less code to manipulate there are less chances for errors since there is less code to review. The tutorials at the online w3schools are a great place to being learning about CSS.
Building on the Foundations of (X)HTML and Cascading Style Sheets
XHTML and CSS are the core components of a web page. The XHTML is the content and CSS is the presentation of that content. Once a programmer feels comfortable with these two tools he or she can move on to JavaScript and PHP to make the page dynamic and interactive for the user!
