Click here for the long answer (it's really long)

What does that all mean (long answer)? HTML stands for Hyper-Text Markup Language, which doesn't mean much, even to a seasoned web designer. But if you looked at the raw HTML that made up a page (you can look at this page's HTML by right clicking anywhere in space on this page, then click on "view source" or "view page source" or some such), you would see everything you see here and a bunch of "tags," which sit inside <these>. Each of those tags means something to the layout of the page. For instance, if you wanted to make this bold, you would surround it with <b>this</b>, which would result in this. Sound simple? It is -- it just gets very knitpicky and frustrating as it gets more complicated.

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, which just means a "sheet" of style commands that "cascade" (duh). As simple as they are, they're quite powerful for page layout and ease of design, once you learn them and all of their immensely frustrating complexities. Different browsers (say, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari) process these CSS commands differently, so it gets complicated in the long run. But in the short run, you can define a "style" for every HTML tag (and define whole classes or blocks of code), which cascade over their sub-tags and the like (if you're still reading this far, I imagine you're here because you're sort of curious). CSS code can even do things that were impossible before them (e.g. it can "freeze" the backgrond image on Lowcountry Surf Report and make parts of the page translucent). Better still, you could define the styles for an entire web site (that is, choose a font for every <p class="someClass"> tag, for instance) rather than tell the page which font to use every time you change fonts, which would get very tiresome very quickly.

JavaScript (no, not JAVA) is a programming language that works with your computer's web browser to make web pages interactive. It gives behaviors to what would otherwise be a static and less sparkly page. Remember when you clicked on "click here for the long answer" and this text magically appeared? That was caused by two lines of JavaScript code. One line basically said make this here big pagagraph appear. And the other said make that there link disappear. That's it. Of course, there are lots and lots of JavScript applications that do a lot more and are a lot more complicated ... like form validation and animation. Want to see a funny animation I was playing with? This is a banner-sized animation of the Pride of Baltimore (a schooner that visited Charleston last year) and a shark. JavaScript animation can be really neat, but it seems to use up a lot of system resources for visitors with older computers, so I tend to stay away from it.

AJAX is really more of a technique than anything. It had been around years before someone coined the nifty term AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. Practically speaking, there is no XML involved, so it's really just a JavaScript capabiliy. What makes it really cool, though, is the ability to connect a given web page back to the server without having to reload the page. What's the big deal? you wonder. Before AJAX was around, anytime you wanted to get new information from the server, you had to click on a link or submit a form, both of which forced the page you were on to reload. Basically, you were getting a new page, even if it was a slightly different version of the page you were on. With AJAX, the page you are on can submit and request data to and from the server while the page itself simply waits for the answer. This makes things much more user-friendly at the very least, since you don't have to scroll down back to where you were on the page. But it makes some new things possible, like form suggestion. Go to Yahoo! and start typing a word into the search field. Don't finish the word. Notice how the page changes to give you some suggestions to help you along. Pretty neat, huh?

PHP is a programming language -- that's right, HTML and CSS are technically not programming languages, just markup languages -- that apparently stands for PHP Hypertext Processor, according to WikiPedia (which would stand for PHP Hypertext Processor Hypertext Processor and so on, if you wanted to get technical), though I've also read it stands for Personal Home Page. You can see how important names are in the computer world. :) Anyway, PHP is one of a number of programming languages that makes a website "smart." ASP, Perl and even C are among others. That is, you can force a website to actually make decisions on the fly based on conditions, have it format images, make it look through a database, etc., all while the page is being loaded, usually so fast that you don't even notice. For example, on Lowcountry Surf Report, PHP code is used to check the current time, look through a database for the next tide changes, display a small icon depending on whether the next tides are high or low and reformat the time from 24-hour time to 12-hour time, all for a small corner of the site (on the top right). PHP is also used for more complex portions of that site, but let's not get into that. E-commerce sites also use programming languages such as PHP to track a user's shopping cart and complete their transactions.

Finally, in this short but longwinded introduction to web technology, MySQL is an open-source database format that stands for My-Structured Query Language. It is one of many structured query language database formats, but it is one of the most popular because of its ease of use, dependability and low cost (did I mention it's open-source? -- that means it's free!). It is a relational database, which means it tracks several spreadsheet-like tables of data that can have connections within one another. It's brilliant, really, and makes so many of the interactive websites on the internet work.

Without programming languages and databases, there would be no email, no online shopping and certainly no online banking!

Well, if you've read this far, good for you. You might just be the world's next web developer. If you'd like to know more, just head over to Google and look up any of these concepts. There is more information about web design on the web that I ever care to read. But it's out there, and it's easy enough to get started. Just open Notepad and start typing! Head over here for some basic lessons.

(843) 696-7237 · sean@lumidev.com