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HTML
Before you can understand much of this, you need to recognize that the secret language that makes a web
page different from a text note you save yourself in Notepad is called a markup language. The hypertext
language just uses <i>tags</i> to turn on and off features like the italics in this sentence!
It is very simple to learn, and all you need to do is save or rename a text file of this sort with the .htm or .html file extension instead of it's normal .txt extension and drag-drop it on your web browser to see the results! That is web publishing in a nutshell! HTML is just text with a special coding to it.
To learn how to write it try the excellent tutorial at Case Western University to learn this simple skill!
Dynamic HTML
There are several different "levels" of what is commonly referred to as Dynamic HTML. This actually consists of a variety of
content options that have either been around for some time, or were just introduced in the newer 4-version browsers, which
are the definitive "Dynamic HTML" viewers.
Foremost among the newer technologies, is the introduction of Style Sheets. A style sheet may be a separate document, or simply
special comments included in the <HEAD> portion of a regular HTML document. There are (were) two different ways to write these
special style instructions, in either Javascript or CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) languages. Since Microsoft were too cheap to licence the genuine Javascript language for the IE browser, (They bootlegged a dangerously
flawed imitation of it called Jscript®, which could not work for style sheets) the CSS version is now the most universal method. Unfortunately, only Netscape/Gekko
version 6 actually supports CSS1 properly, IE4,5,5.5 and Netscape 4 - 4.7 are all more or less broken to varius extents!
CSS which is short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a new system that allows a HTML writer to avoid long font descriptions for different
parts of their page, and specify global formatting options for different block-type areas of content within their page, or entire website.
It's rather useless for this task, since older browsers that are also still popular, ignore this newer, more compact information and
thus will show the page very differently (ultra-plain) without that extra information! Much more important, is the advanced functionality
that these "blocks" of content permit for showing, layering, hiding and moving content around on the screen.
The real purpose behind CSS, was to allow documents to look the same across different browsers and computing systems, particularly in regard to
fonts and text sizes. This is easy to do now if the em (size of this computers m) or ex (size of this computers x) is used as the unit of measure. Unfortunately most of the Windoze-centric software out there that "supports CSS" ignores this, in favor of the more convenient pixel or point
measures which are wildly erroneous on other platforms!
While showing and hiding images can be done with older and all newer javascript browsers without CSS, CSS extends this ability
to other block level content such as paragraphs, forms, tables and even invisibile "division" or entire classes and sub-classes of invisible division blocks
that were not formerly accessable in this manner. Of major new importance is the ability to actually move these things around on the screen, in a sequence
or as a result of events triggered by the user, which was never before possible. Unfortunately such HTML documents (HTML4.0) are totally broken to all older browsers, if
this sort of "absolute" positioning is used, since they are really just lists of items in blocks! The proper use is "relative" positioning, where parts of a normal HTML document are moved around, shown or hidden in relation to their "normal, good" location in a dual-purpose document. Unfortunately, planning plain layers that are intended to sit on top of one another will be a problem if you choose this graceful approach, but it's no problem for most basic animation.
This new functionality allows virtually anything to be done to dynamically present content to users, but since all of the content (and images) contained in such
a page must be loaded into the users browser ahead of time, it can slow down the delivery of content to visitors. Also, alternate means to view that content
should be supplied, which means using some form of new-browser javascript instructions to allow older browsers to stay on a page showing a tamer version of the same content
or instructions to get a new browser, computer or turn their browsers darn features back on. In extreme cases, you may need as many as three different pages to accomplish this!
It's important to note that users of newer browsers also have the option of turning off, some or all of these features, if they're afraid
of "crashing their machine" even though it may be unstable for many other reasons! This also presents a special challenge, since wierd
browsers like IE allow what they refer to as "scripting" (imitation javascript) to be disabled, but not Styles, so if your content is hidden by CSS style comments in a page, a javascript on your page cannot make it "visible" for them!
More later...
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