Julie Meloni - Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript All in One

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Sams Teach Yourself HTML, CSS, and JavaScript All in One

Copyright 2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

ISBN-13: 978-0-672-33332-3
ISBN-10: 0-672-33332-5

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First Printing November 2011

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Julie C. Meloni is the Lead Technologist and Architect in the Online Library Environment at the University of Virginia. Before coming to the library, she worked for more than 15 years in web application development for various corporations large and small in Silicon Valley. She has written several books and articles on Web-based programming languages and database topics, including the bestselling Sams Teach Yourself PHP, MySQL, and Apache All in One.

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Before learning the intricacies of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript, it is important that you gain a solid understanding of the technologies that help transform these plain-text files to the rich multimedia displays you see on your computer or handheld device when browsing the World Wide Web. For example, a file containing markup and client-side code HTML and CSS is useless without a web browser to view it, and no one besides yourself will see your content unless a web server is involved. Web servers make your content available to others who, in turn, use their web browsers to navigate to an address and wait for the server to send information to them. You will be intimately involved in this publishing process because you must create files and then put them on a server to make them available in the first place, and you must ensure that your content will appear to the end user as you intended.

Once upon a time, back when there werent any footprints on the moon, some farsighted folks decided to see whether they could connect several major computer networks together. Ill spare you the names and stories (there are plenty of both), but the eventual result was the mother of all networks, which we call the Internet.

Until 1990, accessing information through the Internet was a rather technical affair. It was so hard, in fact, that even Ph.D.-holding physicists were often frustrated when trying to swap data. One such physicist, the now-famous (and knighted) Sir Tim Berners-Lee, cooked up a way to easily cross-reference text on the Internet through hypertext links.

This wasnt a new idea, but his simple HTML managed to thrive while more ambitious hypertext projects floundered. Hypertext originally meant text stored in electronic form with cross-reference links between pages. It is now a broader term that refers to just about any object (text, images, files, and so on) that can be linked to other objects. Hypertext Markup Language is a language for describing how text, graphics, and files containing other information are organized and linked together.