HTML 4.01

The use of CSS (style sheets)

XHTML

XML and XSLT

Client side scripting

Server side scripting

Managing data with SQL

The future of the Web

HTML is the language of the Web, and every Web developer should have the basic idea about it and also known about the new tags.

HTML 4.01 is an important Web standard. and very different from HTML 3.2.

When tags like <font> and color attributes were added to HTML 3.2, it started a developer's nightmare. Development of web sites where font information must be added to every single Web page is a long and expensive pain.

With HTML 4.01 all formatting can be moved out of the HTML document and into a separate style sheet.

HTML 4.01 is also important because XHTML 1.0 (the latest HTML standard) is HTML 4.01 "reformulated" as an XML application. Using HTML 4.01 in your pages makes the future upgrade from HTML to XHTML a very simple process.

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a the document written in the any markup language: for example HTML or XHTML. It's most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL. The CSS specifications are maintained by the (W3C) World Wide Web Consortium .

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has a simple syntax, and uses a number of English keywords to specify the names of various style properties.

A style sheet consists of a list of rules. Each rule consists of one or more comma-separated selectors and a declaration block. A declaration-block consists of a list of semicolon-separated declarations in curly braces. Each declaration itself consists of a property, a colon (:) then a value.

XHTML is acronym of Extensible HyperText Markup Language.

XHTML 1.0 is the latest HTML standard from W3C. It became an official Recommendation January 26, 2000. A W3C Recommendation means that the specification is stable and that the specification is now a Web standard.

XHTML is a reformulation of HTML version 4.01 in XML and can be put to immediate use with existing browsers by following a few simple guidelines.

XML is a markup language for documents containing structured information.

Structured information contains both content (words, pictures, etc.) and some indication of what role that content plays (for example, content in a section heading has a different meaning from content in a footnote, which means something different than content in a figure caption or content in a database table, etc.). Almost all documents have some structure.

XML is use as a cross-platform, software- and hardware-independent tool for storing and transmitting information.

XSLT is acronym of Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations

XSLT is an XML-based language used, in conjunction with specialized processing software, for the transformation of XML documents.

XSLT allows a stylesheet author to transform a primary XML document in two significant ways: manipulating and sorting the content, including a wholesale reordering of it if so desired, and transforming the content into a different format.

XSLT can also add elements, remove, rearrange and sort elements, test and make decisions about which elements to display, and a lot more.

Client-Side Scripting generally refers to the class of computer programs on the web that are executed client-side, by the user's web browser,

Web authors write client-side scripts in languages such as JavaScript (Client-side JavaScript)

Giving the user more control over the browser.

Detecting the user's browser and OS. The ability to detect the user's browser and OS allows your script to perform platform-dependent operations, if necessary.

Performing simple computations on the client side.

Validating the user's input:JavaScript helps the browser perform input validation without wasting the user's time by the Web server access. If the user makes a mistake in the input, the user will get an error message immediately! On the other hand, if the input information is validated only on the server, then the user would have to wait for the server response.

Handling dates and time.

Generating HTML pages on the fly.

The Structured Query Language (SQL) is the common standard for accessing databases such as SQL Server Access, Oracle, and Sybase,.

Knowledge of the SQL is invaluable for anyone wanting to store or retrieve data from the database.

Any web Developer should know that SQL is the true engine for interacting with databases on the Web.