Web Page Markup: A Programmer's Perspective

Admittedly, there are left-brained and right-brained approaches to creating web pages. While one creates the page with aesthetic style, the other methodically builds the page with a certain order. We are more the latter type

Here’s the geneology of the acronyms we are talking about:

• SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is a generalized or metalanguage for text and documents.
• HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the markup language of the web, currently at release 4.01. It was initially based on SGML.
• ECMA-Script (European Computer Manufacturers Association Scripting Language), also known as Javascript, adds a powerful scripting language to web pages to allow for dynamic page creation and interactive control with users at the web page.
• DHTML (Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language) Allows the page to be dymaniclally created or altered on the web browser platform using Javascript and user interaction. It is not so much a markup, rather a usage of modern HTML and Javascript.
• XML (Extended Markup Lanuage) is the markup of data, also based on SGML.
• CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is what translates the hiararchical code into typographic representation. This is used primarily in XML, but is just as important to the HTML programmer.
• AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a programming method allowing calls back to the web server be made by Javascript via XML (XMLHttpRequest) in the background and the page updated dynamically (like DHTML), instead of the usual action and waiting for the web server response page to be sent and rendered.
• XHTML (Extensible HyperText Markup Language) is the marriage of HTML and XML, providing a well-formed XML-like syntax with a HTML DTD (Document Type Definition, the XML document definitions).

Web standards have emerged, and with it, the two camps really have combined to build modern web sites with best coding practices and the same eye of typography from the printing world. These standards employ XHTML and CSS to build pages, with JavaScript to make them interactive or dynamic (DHTML). The AJAX paradigm is catching on, employing asynromous XML calls with real-time page updates using JavaScript.

• Apache mod_rewrite usage.
• XHTML Basics