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What to Use
All web pages, no matter how they have been designed, are created by coding with programming languages, such as HTML, and are delivered to the screen using protocols, the main one being HTTP. There are a number of different languages, each of which has its own functions and so it is important that you, and your web designer or web agency choose the right language for the job.
Perhaps the most well-known web code is HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is a universal language that allows web designers to create complex web pages from simple text and image files, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Web designers do not need any special software to create a HTML page. With HTML the pages created by your web designer should be viewable by anyone on the Internet no matter what kind of computer or browser they use. Put simply, HTML is a series of tags that are integrated into a text file so you can then add graphics, images and hyperlinks to your document. Hyperlinks connect your document to other pages on the World Wide Web.
Another popular language is DHTML (Dynamic HTML), which uses a variety of different technologies, including JavaScript, VBScript, and Document Object Model (DOM) to create HTML that can change even after a page has been loaded into a browser. Using DHTML your web designer can create a much more stylish web page and be more ambitious with their web design.
Another option is CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which also work hand in hand with HTML documents and can offer different presentational styles, such as fonts, colours and layout. CSS is flexible but allows a single ‘style sheet’ to be applied to many documents thus giving a common and familiar look throughout a website. As well as having advantages for web builders, designing for the web in this way is also a more accessible option.
If your web agency says they use XML (eXtensive Markup Language), to build web sites they are using some of the newer web building technology that works in a more complex way than HTML but can still achieve some exciting web designs. For those who want a little more indepth definition, XML is a language readable by both humans and machines, and basically represents complicated data in a text format.
Web designers have plenty of choice when it comes to how they build a web site and becoming more popular these days is XHMTL (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language), the combination of HTML and parts of XML to make a single language. XHTML was created so that web designers could get your simple HTML pages to a point where they are XML compliant so that complex XML tools can be used to create a more interesting web designs.
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