web designers and developers
You may hear web designers and developers say that they specialize in either the frontend or backend of website creation
“Frontend”refers to any aspect of the design process that
appears in or relates directly to the browser
The following tasks are commonly considered to be frontend
tasks
Graphic design and image production
Interface design
Information design as it pertains to the user’s experience of
the site
HTML document and style sheet development
JavaScript
Backend development
“Backend”refers to the programs and scripts that work on the
server behind the scenes to make web pages dynamic and
interactive
The following tasks take place on the backend
Information design as it pertains to how the information is
organized on the server
Forms processing
y Database programming
Content management systems
Other server-side web applications using PHP, JSP, Ruby,
ASP.NET, Java, and other programming languages
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language used to create web
page documents
HTML is not a programming language; it is a markup language, which
means it is a system for identifying and describing the various components
of a document such as headings, paragraphs, and lists
The best way to learn HTML is to write out some pages by hand, as we will
be doing in the exercises in this book. If you end up working in web production, you’ll live and breathe HTML
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
While HTML is used to describe the content in a web page, it is Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) that describe how that content should look. In the web
design biz, the way the page looks is known as its presentation. That means
fonts, colors, background images, line spacing, page layout, and so on…
all controlled with CSS. With the newest version (CSS3), you can even add
special effects and basic animation to your page.
CSS also provides methods for controlling how documents will be presented
in contexts other than the traditional desktop browser, such as in print and or
on devices with small screen widths
Although it is possible to publish web pages using HTML alone, you’ll
probably want to take on style sheets so you’re not stuck with the browser’s
default styles
JavaScript/DOM scripting
JavaScript is a scripting language that is used to add interactivity and behaviors to web pages, including these (just to name a few):
Checking form entries for valid entrie
Swapping out styles for an element or an entire site
Making the browser remember information about the user for the next
time she visits
JavaScript is used to manipulate the elements on the web page, the styles
applied to them, or even the browser itself. There are other web scripting
languages, but JavaScript (also called ECMAScript) is the standard and most
ubiquitous
Writing JavaScript is a type of programming, so it may be time-consuming
to learn if you have no prior programming experience. .
Server-side programming
Some simple websites are collections of static HTML documents and image
files, but most commercial sites have more advanced functionality such as
forms handling, dynamically generated pages, shopping carts, content management systems, databases, and so on. These functions are handled by web
applications running on the server. There are a number of programming
languages and frameworks (listed in parentheses) that are used to create web
applications, including:
PHP (CakePHP, CodeIngniter, Drupal)
Python (Django, TurboGears)
Ruby (Ruby on Rails, Sinatra)
JavaScript (Node.js, Rhino, SpiderMonkey)
Java (Grails, Google Web Toolkit, JavaServer Faces)
ASP.Net (DotNetNuke, ASP.Net MVC)