All posts tagged ‘wiki’

File Under: HTML, Web Standards
Feb
15
2010

Make an HTML Document

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HTML is the lingua franca of the web. It’s a simple, universal mark-up language that allows web publishers to create complex pages of text and images that can be viewed by anyone else on the web, regardless of what kind of computer or browser is being used.

Despite what you might have heard, you don’t need any special software to create an HTML page; all you need is a word processor (such as SimpleText, BBEdit, or Microsoft Word) and a working knowledge of HTML. And lucky for all of us, basic HTML is dead easy.

It’s All About the Tags

HTML is just a series of tags that are integrated into a text document. They’re a lot like stage directions — silently telling the browser what to do, and what props to use. Continue Reading “Make an HTML Document” »

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Degrade

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How a web page “degrades” refers to how it will be displayed by older or less popular browsers.

The hope is that the web page will “degrade gracefully,” meaning the images and text will be displayed in roughly the same way across a variety of browsers and platforms. If a designer relies heavily on JavaScript, for example, then the site will not work correctly on older browsers and thus not degrade gracefully. This problem of browsers interpreting web pages differently is one reason why protocol is so important. If everyone agreed on one protocol for using HTML, then it would be considerably easier to control how web pages degrade.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Interactive

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A web page is interactive when it prompts a response from the user.

Immediacy is the key to interactivity: If you click on a button that says “chat,” then that experience would be considered “more interactive” if you are immediately able to chat with someone online. The experience would be “less interactive” if the response was an email address for a mailing list on which you are allowed to discuss a particular issue. Interactive is really just another code word for describing how graphical elements in web pages work together with the software behind them.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

DHTML

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Dynamic HTML (dHTML) is a markup language designed to heighten the interactive browsing experience.

Because dHTML can utilize each action of the user (a mouseclick, a rollover, a keystroke), it provides a rich and transparent way to process this data.

One of the powerful abilities of dHTML is to pass JavaScript through a browser as part of a form. For example, when a user checks a box within an HTML form, that click of the mouse can be the action that launches a new window to give or receive further data.

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File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Release Candidate

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The release candidate stage is the stage right between beta and final release, and it’s the last chance for developers to test their code against the browser before it’s push out into the world full-force. It’s also the stage at which add-on developers can update their third-party extensions without worrying about further code changes.

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