By: Jim Pretin

When the HTML programming language was originally developed, the various HTML tags that were used were intended only to specify what each piece of content was. In other words, HTML tags like the paragraph tag, or the header tag, were only supposed to tell the web browser that a certain piece of text should be displayed as a paragraph, or that a particular line of text was to be a header. The web browser itself was supposed to take care of the style of the web page itself.

However, as the HTML language became more and more complex, and evolved from the original HTML into HTML 4.0 and even more complicated versions of the language such as XHTML, the web browser no longer took care of style by itself. Programmers had many more tags and attributes at their disposal, such as the bgcolor attribute, the font tag, and a plethora of others.

As a result, developing a web page became very complicated, because programmers now had to not only specify what was to be on the web page, but had to indicate background colors, fonts, text sizes, and layouts. A solution to this quandary emerged in the form of what is called Cascading Style Sheets.

Cascading style sheets specify how HTML elements are to be displayed. A cascading style sheet is normally an external file saved with a .css file extension and is uploaded with the rest of your web pages.

This .css file specifies a layout for a web page given certain HTML tags and attributes. Then, all the programmer has to do is reference that .css file in the HTML code for the web page he or she is developing and just layout the web page properly, and the .css file will automatically format all of your tags and attributes as specified. Specific styles can be applied to everything from paragraphs to email forms and much more.

There are many websites where programmers can buy or download for free various .css files that they want to use to handle the layout of their web page. All you need to do is look for style sheets on any major search engine and you will find tons of links to sites that will show you how to create style sheets or sites where you can just download for free or buy style sheets that you want to use to design your website.

Basically, there are two different ways that you can use a cascading style sheet. The first way is by using the style sheet externally. Simply upload the .css file that you have either downloaded from somewhere else or created yourself, and then reference that file in the HTML code for the web page you are designing by placing some code within the head tag of the web page. There are many different tutorial websites where you can learn how to create the code to reference an external style sheet.

Also, you can actually create your style sheet internally by actually coding the style of certain kinds of tags within the head tag of the web page itself rather than saving the style sheet as an external file.

Also, you can use what is called inline styles, where you specify the style of a specific element within the web page so that the style will apply to just that particular tag and not all of the tags on the web page.

Whatever you decide to do, as a web designer you should become familiar with cascading style sheets and use them, especially if you do a lot of web design projects. You should accumulate your own library of style sheets, either by creating them on your own or by downloading them from somewhere else.

Having these style sheets on hand will make your job as a web designer faster and more efficient. It will enable you to design web pages very quickly without having to focus so much on the design, and then you can show your customer many different sample designs of the web page you have created by just changing a single line of code and using a different .css file each time. Then, your customer can just choose the style that he or she likes best.

Article Source: http://www.homebusinessresourcedirectory.com

About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com a service that helps programmers make email forms.

NOTE: You may use this article for reprint ONLY if you DO NOT change the article in ANY way, AND you keep the source and bio IN TACT with ALL links ACTIVE!

By: Jim Pretin

For those of you who have just started designing web sites, you are probably well versed in the basics of the HTML programming language. HTML is an easy language to learn. Most beginning web designers are self-taught. They learn HTML through simple online tutorials. HTML, however, is not the only language of cyberspace. There is a lot more to web programming than meets the eye.

HTML only takes care of the front end. There are many other languages and specifications that handle the back end. Javascript, Visual Basic, PHP and a host of other programming languages make a web site come to life. One such important and valuable language is Standard Query Language (SQL), which is the focus of this article.

SQL is the primary language for accessing and interacting with databases running on the back end of a web site. Whenever you use a website to access information, you are using SQL to extract the information you want from the database where the information is stored. SQL works with almost all database programs, such as MS Access, DB2, Informix, MS SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase.

Databases generally consist of tables. Tables consist of records. Each record in a table contains certain information, separated by columns. For example, a dating website where people can post their profiles would probably consist of a table holding a record of each person who has a membership. In each record, there would be different columns containing information about that particular person. There would likely be a column for height, weight, age, marital status, and other personal information.

When someone using that dating website searches for a profile that matches certain criteria that they are looking for in a potential mate, their query is converted into an SQL statement. That SQL statement interacts with the database, pulls out the profiles that match the search criteria, and then returns the search results to the user. SQL statements consist of commands such as Select, Update, Insert, and Delete.

Here is an example of an SQL statement:

SELECT Name,Height,Weight from BODY;

This statement will retrieve all of the data from the Name, Height, and Weight columns contained within the table called Body. SQL is not case sensitive, but the example listed above uses caps to make the statement easier to read. SQL is used not only to find certain things within a table, but to add and remove data as well.

SQL is perhaps the most important programming language of the web. After all, the primary reason why we use the internet is to obtain information about a certain topic. Almost all websites have a database where this information is stored, and SQL enables us to find what we are looking for. All web designers need to understand how to create a simple database and how to create simple SQL statements to make that database accessible to the user. Since the syntax of the language is not complicated, it is easy to learn SQL using online tutorials. If you prefer, you can enroll in SQL courses offline at a local college or computer programming institute. Either way, you need to learn SQL because it is perhaps the most vital programming language of the world wide web.

Article Source: http://www.homebusinessresourcedirectory.com

About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com a service that helps programmers make email forms.

NOTE: You may use this article for reprint ONLY if you DO NOT change the article in ANY way, AND you keep the source and bio IN TACT with ALL links ACTIVE!

By: Jim Pretin

The advent of wireless internet access has made web design a very complicated matter. Previously, all web browsers were created equal. HTML was the only language used to create web sites, and it was only possible to go online with a desktop PC.

Since the turn of the century, cyberspace has changed. It is now possible to surf the world wide web using a wide variety of wireless gadgets, such as cell phones, palm tops, laptops, computer screens in automobiles, etc. As a result, new programming languages and specifications that are more versatile than HTML have evolved to create websites that can be displayed on the new web browsers utilized by these various devices.

Languages such as XML, XHTML, XSL, and a host of other programming innovations were developed because web sites coded in basic HTML were not being displayed properly on the browsers installed on all these neat gadgets. XML is a language that enables data to be displayed across all platforms because XML is a simple text file that merely defines data, it does not tell the web browser how to display the data. XSL and XHTML were created so that XML could be transformed into a web page.

Now that you have a basic understanding of how and why programming has changed, you are ready for a brief introduction to the main topic of this article, XQuery. XQuery was invented so that there was a way to query data stored in an XML document, much the same way SQL is used to query a database.

XQuery uses simple functions to query a document. An XQuery function looks a little like a javascript function in that it uses parentheses containing an element that is to be the object of the function. With XQuery, the element in parentheses is typically the name of the document or file to be queried. To find what it is looking for within that file, XQuery narrows its search by using path expressions that look a lot like the path for an ordinary file stored on your computer, with the various subsets of data within the XML file separated by backslashes. The predicate is the final component of an XQuery function. The predicate tells the function exactly what information, data, or range of data within a particular subset is to be extracted and returned to the user.

For example, an XML file for a dating website would contain a list of men and women who have posted their profiles on the website. Some of the people in the XML file might be classified as single, while others might classified as divorced. The XML file would also contain the age of each man and woman. If a woman were to visit that dating website and perform a search for profiles of only single men who are over the age of 30, that search request would be converted into an XQuery function that would contain a path that would tell the function to search through the list of men who are classified as single, and the predicate would instruct the function to return only the profiles of the single men who are older than 30.

Learning how to use XML, XHTML, and XQuery is of critical importance to every web designer or programmer. There are now so many ways to connect to the internet using computers that run on different platforms that are no longer compatible with many elements of the HTML programming language. Web designers need to be conscious of this and start designing web sites that utilize XML and XQuery.

Article Source: http://www.homebusinessresourcedirectory.com

About the Author: Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make email forms.

NOTE: You may use this article for reprint ONLY if you DO NOT change the article in ANY way, AND you keep the source and bio IN TACT with ALL links ACTIVE!