Welcome To The Pack: Web Authoring

What is HTML?

Hyper Text Markup Language or more popularly and commonly known as HTML. This language is one of the fundamentals into creating web pages.

The web browser purpose is to read HTML documents and compose the document into visual and audial web pages. The browser does not show any of the HTML tags, but uses the tags to construct the content of the page. HTML is the building blocks of all websites; this allows objects and images to be embedded to create interactive pages. It offers a means to create structured documents by indicating an operational semantics for texts such as paragraphs, lists, heading, quotes, links and other items. It can also embed scripts written in other languages such as JavaScript which would affect the behaviour of the HTML web pages.

Most commonly used HTML tag

<!DOCTYPE html> - It tells the browser how to render the page.

<html> - the beginning line of the starting the HTML semantics.

<head> This may contain information about the page and links to resources.

</head> ends the head declaration

<title> - the custom name given by the user to the browsers tab/page.

</title> ends the title declarations

<body> - where most of the text/images/object are put in and is mainly the meat of creating a web page.

</body> the end declaration for body.

</html> ends declaration for the whole HTML semantics

Advantages:

· It’s easy to edit.
· It’s fast to download.
· Once you get to know CSS it’s easy to learn everything.
· It’s customary in mostly every HTML
· It’s supported by most browsers across most platforms.
· Can be used to present just about any kind of data.

Disadvantages:

· It’s static and needs to be manually updated.
· Isn't quite often rendered out correctly in all browsers

· Isn't very flexible.
· It can’t be centralised (all pages must be edited individually).
· Very limited styling capabilities.

This is the HTML tags all filled out

This is what the HTML looks like after its been previewed on a browser

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheets or commonly known as CSS this a style sheet language used into defining the look and formatting of a document written in HTML. CSS most often is used to style web pages and is a foundation to almost all web pages and mostly every web pages use CSS style sheets to describe their web pages.

CSS is designed primarily to enable content from document presentation, which would include elements such as colours, fonts, and the layout. These sections can improve the content of accessibility which provides more control and flexibility in the requirement of the web pages characteristics.

Advantages

· Bandwidth – The style sheet is generally stored in the browser cache, therefore being able to be used on multiple pages, which would also increases the download speed.
· Reformatting - Different style sheet can be used in the same page. This provides the chance of adjusting a page or a site for different target devices.
· Flexibility - This allows the provider to edit CSS or HTML code from a selection of layouts of articles or pages that they have chosen on the fly.
· Consistency - If the situation arises in the style elements and should be changed/adjusted, these changes can be made easily, by simply by changing some rules in the style sheet.

Disadvantages

· Inconsistent Browser Support - Different browsers will render out the CSS layout differently because of the different elements the browser has or lack in.
· Limiting Vertical Control - While the horizontal placements are pretty much simple to figure out. Vertical placement tends to be more complicating or even impossible.
· Control of forms - CSS currently provides only rectangular shapes which really limit the form for CSS.
· No column Declaration - While possible to have with multiple columns in CSS it tends to be quite complex to implement.
· No multiple backgrounds – When a web page needs multiple background images for each item, CSS can support only one.