Tools of the Trade
Markup
HTML
HyperText Markup Language - a markup language used to structure text and multimedia documents and to set up hypertext links between documents, used extensively on the World Wide Web.
XHTML
eXtensible HTML - a markup language for Web pages from the W3C. XHTML combines HTML and XML into a single format (HTML 4.0 and XML 1.0). Like XML, XHTML can be extended with proprietary tags. Also like XML, XHTML must be coded more rigorously than HTML. Over the years, HTML coders have become sloppy, because Web browser software was originally written to tolerate many variations in HTML coding. With XHTML, coders must conform to the rules.
XML
eXtensible Markup Language - an open standard for describing data from the W3C. It is used for defining data elements on a Web page and business-to-business documents. XML uses a similar tag structure as HTML; however, whereas HTML defines how elements are displayed, XML defines what those elements contain. While HTML uses predefined tags, XML allows tags to be defined by the developer of the page. Thus, virtually any data items, such as "product", "sales rep" and "amount due," can be identified, allowing Web pages to function like database records. By providing a common method for identifying data, XML supports business-to-business transactions and has become "the" format for electronic data interchange and Web services.
Styling
CSS
Cascading Style Sheets is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.
XSLT
eXtensible Style Language for Transformations - XML markup language that describes how an XML document is converted into another XML document with a different tag structure, or into HTML or text.
Programming
ASP
(Active Server Page) A Web server technology from Microsoft that allows for the creation of dynamic, interactive sessions with the user. An ASP is a Web page that contains HTML and embedded programming code written in VBScript or Jscript. It was introduced with Version 3.0 of Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). When IIS encounters an ASP page requested by the browser, it executes the embedded program. ASPs are Microsoft's alternative to CGI scripts and JavaServer Pages (JSPs), which allow Web pages to interact with databases and other programs.
ASP.NET
ASP.NET, also known as ASP+, is an enhanced version of ASP for the .NET platform. It supports executable programs compiled from C#, C++ and other languages and is not backward compatible with regular ASP code. ASP.NET pages are always compiled rather than interpreted as are ASP pages.
VB
A version of the BASIC programming language from Microsoft specialized for developing Windows applications. When first released in 1991, it was similar to Microsoft's QuickBASIC. With its visual user interface development tools, Visual Basic became very popular by the mid-1990s. Visual Basic 6.0, which was released in early 1999, was the last version of Visual Basic to be offered as a stand-alone development product. Visual Basic became part of Visual Studio.NET.
VB.NET
(Visual Basic .NET) An object-oriented programming language from Microsoft. It is the .NET version of the Visual Basic (VB) programming language. Like all .NET languages, VB.NET uses the Common Language Runtime (CLR) for program execution. VB.NET is substantially different from traditional Visual Basic, which has been the most popular language for developing Windows applications.
C#
(C Sharp) An object-oriented programming language from Microsoft and ECMA that is based on C++ with elements from Visual Basic and Java. Like Java, C# provides automatic garbage collection, whereas traditional C and C++ do not. C# was created by Microsoft and also standardized by the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA). Microsoft designed C# as its flagship programming language for the .NET environment.
JavaScript
A popular scripting language that is widely supported in Web browsers and other Web tools. It adds interactive functions to HTML pages, which are otherwise static, since HTML is a display language, not a programming language. JavaScript is easier to use than Java, but not as powerful and deals mainly with the elements on the Web page.
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