Web Technology Basics – My Primer

I’m realizing that I’ve promised my friends and colleagues exciting, new information here on this blog.  While many of the things I’ve written about have been, in fact, new, I relate frequently to things that anyone who’s a general student of social media might have come across or found someone to help them tackle.  Be assured we are covering things of much greater depth in classes (which I why I’m paying so much money for them – I think…) but they’re generally difficult topics for me to address (novice that I am) in great enough clarify with the sort of brevity that a blog requires.

It did occur to me, however, that one class that is probably quite unfamiliar to most of my friends/colleagues working in communications would be the information we cover on technology or web design.

Here, then, is my very brief primer on keywords to learn and resources to consult:

1. HTML – Hyper-text Markup Language: Most people think they know what HTML is – I challenge that assumption.  If you can’t open the page source on a web-site and read a few tags, then you don’t know what it is.  The ultimate resource on HTML and XHTML is the World-Wide Web Consortium or WC3.  The WC3 gathers together many influential people in the Internet world to help set standards for mark-up languages.
2. XML – Extensible Mark-up Language: The mark-up language that is the parent of XHTML, the WC3’s choice for most recent standard mark-up language.  It’s role in building a website is to let the creator separate the information from the appearance (important because if you want to change the way something looked before XML, you had to re-create much of what you’d done before, now you just change your style sheets).  Check out XML at xml.com.
3. CSS – Cascading Style Sheets: I haven’t learned much about these personally, because our classes don’t delve into the actual process of designing a site’s appearance.  However, this is the most commonly accepted tool for coding the appearance of site (which you’ve separated from the data using XML).  Learn more about CSS from the W3 Schools.
4. HTTP – Hyper Text Transfer Protocol: This can get way more technical than I’m equipped to explain, but basically, this is the standard for how browsers (on individual computers) get web-page information from servers.  There’s a request sent which follows the rules of the protocol and information is returned to the requesting side.  If you want to get all geeked out on learning about HTML look at Wikipedia.
5. API – Application Programming Interface: API’s have been the big buzz lately; they’re the reason that new social sites like Facebook and Twitter have so many private people building applications related to those sites.  Basically, API’s are a library of information about how the owners of the original website built that website.  Other people can use this information to build programs that draw information from the original website based on what they’ve learned.  Get way more in-depth info on API’s at Wikipedia or check out a list of available API’s at Programmable Web.
6. Client-side or Server-side: This describes where the ‘work’ on a website gets done.  Many applications read all of the X/HTML in the browser on your computer (the work is done ‘client-side’) while others need some special help that can only be done in the server (’server-side’).  Most anything in XHTML or what’s called Javascript works on the client side, while the less publicly-recognizable programs (Ruby on Rails, Perl, C++, Java) get done on the server-side.  Here’s a bit of a dry (but well-explained) video on the concept.

I think 6 concepts is good for the time being, but I’ll be back in a few months with the low-down for you on design approaches and terms like “agile development” and “wire-framing”.    In the mean-time, you could also check out the blog of my Technology course teacher, Andrew Schrock (smart guy, that Andrew).

Ch-ch-changes…

I’ll be focusing a bit more on this again after having a few crazy weeks there.  Visits to USC and my new class at UCLA in addition to a few heavy weeks in the office have left me without much to give here, but I’m renewing my efforts.

There will be more links coming soon, as I’ll be linking to classmates from my Social Media Marketing course through the UCLA Extension program and I’m sure many of them will have great things to share.

I’ll also be focusing on making sure that I post at least twice weekly (Thursday and Sunday were the original post date goals and I’ll be working toward that again).

Looking forward to having more to say and many people to connect to!