Client Side
HTML, or Hyper Text Markup Language, is the most basic language of the web.
It is a set of tags that allow a developer to organize information in the
form of a web site.
HTML 4.01 is the newest HTML specification, and is (almost) fully implemented
in all of the version 4.0 and greater browsers. HTML 3.2 is an outdated
specification that is supported by the version 3.0 browsers.
XHTML is a reformulation of HTML 4 in XML. It is the new specification
that is intended to replace HTML. XHTML combines the ease of HTML with
the power and flexibility of XML.
XHTML will eventually allow developers to write one page that can be
displayed accross all platforms, from desktop computers to internet-
enabled tablets to cellular phones and PDAs.
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is an old specification that is
just now close to being properly implemented by the major
browsers.
It makes life 1,000 times simpler for web developers
by allowing us to separate the style of a document (like font
color and size, and the positioning of elements) from the
content of a document (the actual text and graphic information).
JavaScript (now ECMAScript) is a feature rich programming
language that is supported natively by almost all web
browsers.
It is powerful enough for complex and interactive applications
to be written to run inside browsers, and simple enough to
accomodate easy enhancements to static web sites.
Dynamic HTML is a combination of all of the above technologies.
It involves HTML (or XHTML) and CSS for page
layout, and JavaScript to change the properties
of elements on the page.
An example of Dynamic HTML is using CSS to position an image
on a page, and using JavaScript to animate that image to the
opposite side of the page.
Dynamic HTML can be used to create much more complicated pages
as well. Fully-functional web applications can be written using
Dynamic HTML.
Server Side
PHP is an open source embedded scripting language. It is
easier to implement and faster than Perl. It can communicate
with just about any database system imaginable. It can
create images on the fly.
PHP is our server side language of choice because of its
ease of use and its speed.
Perl is also an open source language. It can be used to
create simple CGI scripts to, for example, parse user-submitted
information or create web pages on the fly.
Perl can also be used to create more complex, powerful
programs to handle almost any job you could throw at it. It is
for this reason that Perl is our language of choice for
developing robust, scalable applications that are invincible.
MySQL is an open source and blazingly fast database system.
We are familiar with creating web-based applications with
MySQL with both PHP and Perl.
XML, or eXtensible Markup Language, is an emerging standard
that allows for extremely flexible and logical data organization.
It is not really a server side language, but we believe that
its only real use (from an internet standpoint) is the organization
of data that is to be parsed by some other server side language
before being presented to the user.
Applications
Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard application for
graphics creation and manipulation. We have been using
and abusing it since version 4.0.
We also use Adobe ImageReady (bundled with Photoshop 5+)
for image optimization and to create animated GIFs (which
we avoid like the plague).
Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard application
for creating (guess what) illustrations and other original
graphics like logos.
Allaire Homesite is an indespensable tool for coding for
web sites. Since we write all of our own code, we find
that this application is a life saver. If we could, we'd
marry Homesite.
