Language of the Web

There has been one thing that has frustrated me over the past 3 and a half years of my college career. My major here at the University of Northern Iowa, Graphic Communications, offers one web publishing course. The course basically has the student follow tutorials from a book that are more about navigating through Adobe Dreamweaver than learning HTML/CSS and how professional web developers/designers use lines of code to compose fully-functioning websites. At the end of the course I was basically more familiar with Dreamweaver and learned a little about HTML, however going through tutorials using pre-made designs/files instead of working with something you create and turning that into an operating website are completely different things, the latter being more beneficial to a student, in my opinion. These deficiencies in the web aspect of my major have resulted in a lot of restless nights and ultimately making me buy a book from amazon.com to go through and attempt to teach myself coding.

So what is the language of the web? The answer to that is HTML, or most commonly referred to these days as XHTML. HTML5 is getting a ton of hype and is the direction for web design of the future. If you are interested in what is all new within HTML5 you can google the term and you will get endless amounts of thoughts, reviews, comments, etc. about it. But what is XHTML and how is it used to build stunning websites that let people do things they take for granted everyday when they log online and trust a site to navigate them where they need to go? Basically a XHTML file contains a bunch of different abbreviations between brackets. To start something you might have the letter p (for paragraph) in between a < and >, followed by some text, and then a closing tag of the same two brackets only there is a backslash after the first bracket, like this: </>.

<p> This is a paragraph in a XHTMLfile</p>

There are far too many bits of text that can go between an opening and closing tag to mention in this blog. For example, you have <strong> to make a line of text or individual word appear bold, you have <ul> to create an unordered list, and you have <a href="" /> to create a working link on a page. It all appears overwhelming at first trying to learn this new language, and I will admit I have come to many struggles in attempting to learn it. Practice makes perfect so I try and squeeze in a little learning time whenever I have free time to show my dedication to mastering the language of the web.

To make things more interesting there is more on top of learning XHTML to create visually appealing websites. If you were to enter a bunch of paragraphs, lists, and links like i listed in the paragraph above the text would appear in default black color, there would be a boring white background, and that is basically about it. That doesn't sound like a very exciting website does it? The answer that web designers/developers use to add color and visual aspects on top of the code is called CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). These style sheets allow the developer to assign properties to the XHTML so it has a consistent color scheme, text size, etc. throughout an entire website, obviously a very powerful tool. Once again there is far too much to discuss with CSS than I could possibly include in this blog.

The combination of XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript (something I haven't had time to even begin to look at yet) are the basic ingredients to create modern day web pages. I just wanted to blog to anyone curious about web design and what some of the key terms are to research if someone wanted to pursue web development any further. Learning the language of the web has given me a few headaches and I am still towards the beginner end of it, but I am pretty dedicated in researching myself and going through my book I bought to learn XHTML and CSS. It's an uphill battle however I just hope it shows a future employer down the road that I at least had the willingness to go out on my own and teach myself something that was lacking at the University of Northern Iowa.