Information Technology · Ch 3 — Impressive Web Designing
Web Designing Basics — Websites, Web Pages and Browsers
Web Designing Basics — Websites, Web Pages and Browsers
What Is a Web Page and a Website
A web page is a single document that can be displayed in a web browser. It may contain text, images, links to other pages, tables, and other content. A website is a collection of related web pages that belong together under one name and are usually linked to one another — for example, a school's website may have a home page, an "About Us" page, an "Admissions" page, and a "Contact" page, all linked together. The first or main page of a website, which usually opens by default, is called the home page.
The Web Browser
A web browser is the software used to open and view web pages — it reads the HTML and CSS instructions that make up a page and renders (draws) the page on the screen for the user to see. A browser is what turns the plain text instructions written by a web designer into the colourful, formatted page a visitor actually sees.
Static and Dynamic Web Pages
Web pages are broadly of two kinds:
- A static web page shows the same fixed content to every visitor until the designer manually changes the underlying file. It is built mainly with HTML and CSS. A simple "About the school" information page is a good example.
- A dynamic web page can change its content automatically depending on the situation — for example, who has logged in, what the user searched for, or data fetched from a database. Dynamic pages use additional programming beyond plain HTML/CSS.
This chapter focuses on building static web pages using HTML and CSS, which is the foundation on which all further web development is built.
HTML and CSS — Two Languages With Two Jobs
Two languages work together to create the appearance of a web page:
- HTML (HyperText Markup Language) provides the structure and content of the page — it marks up which text is a heading, which is a paragraph, where an image or a table goes, and so on. HTML is a markup language, not a programming language: it describes and arranges content rather than performing calculations or logic. …
A single document, displayed in a web browser, that may contain text, images, links, tables, a …
A collection of related, usually inter-linked web pages grouped together under one name, whose main pag …
Software that reads the HTML and CSS of a web page and renders it on the screen for t …
The markup language that provides the structure and content of a web page — headings, paragraphs, lists, links, image …
The language that controls the style and presentation of a web page — its colours, fonts, spacing, bo …