What is a website made of?
I’m not sure if my clients are interested in how their websites work. Most of us (myself included) are very happy to drive cars and use computers without actually knowing what is going on inside them. But, for the curious, I am going to describe here here the various ingredients that make up a website. (This does not include all the various tools and technologies used to make them – that’s for a later article I guess).
Code
HTML
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is not a computer language that completes tasks or performs operations. Rather, it is a markup language that gives the content of a webpage structure and meaning. For example, the most important heading on the page would be marked with the first-order header element, <h1>, like so: <h1>This is really important!</h1>.
CSS
CSS, or Cascading StyleSheets, are what make that first-order header look like an important piece of content on the page. For example, we might style it with these rules:
h1{
font-size:2em;
font-weight:bold;
color:pink;
}
Which would look like:
This is really important!
The style rules used to create the look and feel of an entire website can become quite complex, so they are normally kept in separate stylesheets, and simply linked to in the html document.
Javascript
Javascript is a language used on the web to manipulate the html and css on the page in various ways. It has a lot of applications, from simple tasks such as highlighting an updated element to complex applications drawing in data from other websites and presenting it in new ways and new contexts.
Images
The web would be fairly dull without images. In fact, at the moment, you could scarcely have a curved shape or a fancy font on a website without images. Images can be elements of the design, such as logos, buttons, borders, backgrounds, and corners, and these are usually fixed into the layout as background images. Of course, images can also be featured content, such as in galleries and slideshows, or images accompanying blog posts.