What Is HTML, CSS, and PHP?

The web design world is full of acronyms. Here is a quick run down of what is what, and how it is relevant.

HTML

HyperText Markup Language. HTML is the actual code that divides your site up into blocks of information. It also provides information to your browser and search engines about characteristics of the page such as its title, encoding, and what resources it needs to display as intended. HTML comes in a few different flavors. HTML 4.x is on its way out the door. You can usually identify these sites by their extensive use of the <table> tag to layout and place everything on the page. XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 were next on the scene and brought the idea of separating the content of the page and the visual style of the page. The new kid on the block is HTML 5. The goal of HTML 5 was to minimize plugins for viewing media and to create semantic content. If you are in the market for a new website do not accept anything less than XHTML 1, and if you’re forward thinking discuss HTML 5 with your web designer.

CSS

Cascading Style Sheets determine how the content of the HTML page is displayed. Style sheets let you set the color of text, background colors, the sizes of various elements, and present the page differently on different devices (desktop vs. mobile). The flavors of CSS are 1.x, 2.x, and the upcoming 3.0. Unfortunately some widely used browsers are very spotty in their support of 2.x and above standards. In particular Internet Explorer has very poor support for many types of web standards, this among them. They are referred to as cascading styles because elements inherit certain properties from their parent elements. Look for at least CSS 2.x on any new web project.

PHP

Pre-Hypertext Processing is a scripting language that resides on the web server and allows the programmer to create dynamic content. PHP allows information to be stored and retrieved from databases, send emails from forms, create template systems for easy site maintenance, and provide the ability to create content management systems.

MySQL

MySQL is a Relational Database system that is named after one of the earlier developer’s daughter and the acronym SQL (Structured Query Language). MySQL allows websites to store information that can then be manipulated using scripting. A database is necessary for most CMS and shopping cart installations.

JavaScript

Javascript is a scripting language that runs in your browser not on the server. It is widely supported across all major browsers and many mobile devices. Javascript can be used to load changed parts of the page without reloading the whole page, creating interactive menus, and validating information entered into forms, plus many many other uses.