Overview
One way to think of how a web page works is through how web pages are structured. And one of the current ways we talk about web page structure is by dividing it up between content, style, and behavior.
Content
XHTML (an acronym for the eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) supplies and structures basic web page content. XHTML can also give a page basic styling like you see on this page. Headings and subheadings and paragraphs take on larger or smaller font sizes and a bolder font weight, etc. You can also make text italic, underlined or make it bold. You can also create links to other pages. As an example, here's what this paragraph looks like as bare XHTML code:
<p>
<acronym title="Extensible Hypertext Markup Language">XHTML</acronym> (an ancronym for the e<u>X</u>tensible <u>H</u>yper<u>T</u>ext <u>M</u>arkup <u>L</u>anguage) supplies and structures basic web page content. XHTML can also give a page basic styling like you see on this page. Headings and subheadings and paragraphs take on larger or smaller font sizes and a bolder font weight, etc. You can also make text <em>italic, </em><u>underlined</u> or make it<strong> bold</strong>. You can also create links to <a href="http://design.modwest.com/" title="Modwest's Design web site">other pages</a>. As an example, here's what this paragraph looks like as bare XHTML code:
</p>
Your web browser interprets the above code tags for you (like the paragraph beginning <p> and ending </p> tags), presenting the text as the code instructs.
Style
The content that XHTML provides can be styled using CSS (an ancronym for Cascading Style Sheets), a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language like XHTML.
Behavior
You can also add behavior to web sites using JavaScript, a server-side scripting language, i.e. a computer programming language that can make a web page perform specified actions. Click here to show or hide the lines by Shakespeare below, for example.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
— from A Midsummer's Night's Dream
Images can also be given interesting effects as well.
Clicking the thumbnail above demonstrates what's now known as the lightbox effect.
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