Lesson 7

When working within the context of website development, you should be knowledgeable about all the components of the process. Whether your interest is on the technical, business or creative side, you should have some familiarity with what your options are for software purchase and deployment. You will need to have a common language so that you can speak intelligently with other members of your team, vendors, consultants, and your clients.

Once your content is ready to go (you’ve proofread it, right?) and you have added the markup to structure the document (<!DOCTYPE>, html, head, title, meta charset, and body), you are ready to identify the elements in the content. This chapter introduces the elements you have to choose from for marking up text. There probably are not as many of them as you might think, and really just a handful that you’ll use with regularity. That said, this chapter is a big one and covers a lot of ground.
As we begin our tour of elements, I want to reiterate how important it is to choose elements semantically.
That is, in a way that most accurately describes the content’s meaning. If you don’t like how it looks, change it with a style sheet. A semantically marked-up document ensures your content is available and accessible in the widest range of browsing environments, from desktop computers and mobile devices to assistive screen readers. It also allows non-human readers, such as search engine indexing programs, to correctly parse your content and make decisions about the relative importance of elements on the page. With these principles in mind, it is time to meet the HTML text elements, starting with the most basic element of them all, the humble paragraph.

You should now be able to:

1. Identify the functions of the four main kinds of languages for Web development
2. Describe the characteristics of common Internet markup languages
3. Describe the functions of common types of scripting languages
4. Explain the difference between front-end and back-end applications
5. Explain the purpose of middleware and give examples.

In the next module, you will be looking at the other two types of software: databases and bundled solutions.