Webcoding tutorial

To really understand the beauty of webcoding, you need to know what we are talking about. Therefore some definitions first.

Site:
also known as website
The complete system to create a visible output when visiting a certain internet address;
Also used to denote only the HTML document, that has attached styling information and scripts (a webpage, a website).
Internet address:
also known as IP address
The computer's address in the internet;
A number like this: 144.155.10.5, denoting an individual computer in the global computer network.
Website address:
also known as domainname
The human readable address of your site, e.g. www.example.com
The human readable address of your server computer, hosting the website.
Client-side:
also known as front-side
The visitor's computer, with software installed to view sites: a "browser";
The site that is downloaded to the computer of the site visitor;
An HTML document with attached scripts and styles, which are all interpreted by the browser and a visible site is shown.
Server-side:
also known as back-side
The server computer where your site resides;
The site creation by the server using data from a user/visitor, a database or files;
The transformation of data to html code, ready to be send to a client pc where it can be viewed with a browser.
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Traffic going from server to client pc, is called downloading

Traffic going from client to server pc, is called uploading.

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You might wonder about the relationship between server computer internet addresses (numbers) and domain names (human readable website names).

DNS, dynamic name serving, is an internet service which translates registered domainnames, when entered in the browser address bar, into physical server IP addresses.

Every computer set up for the internet should know about a DNS server, doing the transformation of human readable addresses into numbers, making sure you connect to the correct site server.

Websites can be created as a collection of styled pages linking to each other. In this case there is no server-side scripting needed for your site. Meaning, at the server, the complete website is just copied and send to the visitor's computer. No "server thinking" is needed: you ask for a html/site document/page at a certain address, and the document at that address is send to you.

Get the manager's summary of the XHTML, CSS and Javascript stories. These are the coding languages at hand to create a flexible client-side website GUI.

Websites can also be software, being server-side code that outputs those client-side pages on demand, and stores information that a user sends. Code that stores/gets/updates information from a database or files and generates a site.

PHP and SQL are at the server-side responsible for generating a client-side product, depending on the user request.

Recently there has been a lot of fuzz about "AJAX", asynchronous client-server communication in website systems, to keep internet traffic minimal: data transport up and down the server updating the front-side website GUI live, as requested. Live as in "no page-reload". This site also uses the ajax way of thinking, click on the next links to experience it.

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Webdesigners are probably only interested in my coding tricks.
;-)

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