Although businesses will have a defined team that is responsible for the technical aspects of designing the website, it is important for the marketing team to possess a basic understanding of the various website formats and their advantages or limitations. This knowledge helps the marketing team make an informed choice on the kind of information that they would like to include on the website and whether the existing web design is capable of displaying the required information in the manner intended by the marketing team.
A brief overview of the more frequently used web languages follows. As previously mentioned, expertise in this area is not a necessary requirement for marketing teams, but a general understanding is recommended.
XHTML / HTML
XHTML is the basic language of the web. Using this technology alone will enable website developers to build simple, text-based websites.
A more advanced version is known as Dynamic HTML. DHTML is the concept of using a combination of a static markup language (such as HTML), a scripting language (such as JavaScript), a presentation definition language (such as CSS), and the Document Object Model (see below).
DHTML allows scripting languages to change variables in a web page's definition language, which in turn affects the look and function of otherwise "static" HTML page content, after the page has been fully loaded and during the viewing process. Thus, the “dynamic” characteristic of DHTML is the way it functions while a page is viewed, providing greater interactivity and accessibility to users.
The Document Object Model
The Document Object Model, or DOM, is a language-independent convention for representing and interacting with objects in HTML, XHTML, and XML documents. It allows a web designer to manipulate the contents of a web page.
When an HTML page is rendered in browsers, the browser downloads the HTML into local memory and automatically parses it to display the page on screen. The DOM is also the way JavaScript transmits the state of the browser in HTML pages.
CSS
CSS stands for cascading style sheets and is a style sheet language used for describing the appearance and formatting of a document written in a markup language. CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content.
JavaScript
JavaScript is used in conjunction with HTML to access the Document Object Model (DOM) of the web page. JavaScript runs locally on the user's computer and can respond quickly to the user (as opposed to scripts that run on the web server that may take longer to react).
There are several advantages to using JavaScript, including:
- Dynamically changing images when the user hovers over them;
- User input on a form is validated;
- A new window opens when a link or image is clicked.
