WEB PROGRAMMING OVERVIEW

The basic language of the Web is HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), a markup language that uses tags to specify the structure of the page content. HTML is easy to use and to learn; for example, take a look at the following:

<h2>My Web Page</h2>

This markup shows an h2 heading that tells the browser to display the text information between the opening and closing tag in a specific way -- including the size of the text, the weight of the text, and spacing before and after the text.

You can change the presentation of the h2 heading through HTML tags, such as <font>:

<h2><font color="red"><em>My Web Page</em></font></h2>

You can also change the presentation using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to obtain the same effect, as shown in the following code:

<style type="text/css">
  h2 {color: red;
  font-style: italic;}
</style>

CSS is the Web-standard compliant way to achieve these results. You can read more about Web standards at the W3C Web site (http://www.w3.org/).

This style block added to the head section of your page applies the style (red and italic) to the content of every <h2> in the page.

Web designers and developers have taken HTML to the limits of its capability to control page presentation. With the addition of CSS and multimedia elements, HTML can be used to create amazing visually interesting displays of information. But what if you want to interact with your Web visitors, not just show them information? In that case you need to add something more to HTML.