Obviously I haven't been blogging here in quite some time. I think that is going to change, and the changes I've gone through professionally, which I think largely mirror trends in the industry in general, should become clear.
I used to be proficient on the "server side" of the web equation (hence the blog title), meaning I mostly focused on the server: linux admin, Apache, MySQL, PHP (plus email, dns, and everything else that happens on the server.) I still do all that, but things don't change very much or very quickly inside that technology stack. The other side of the equation is the stuff that happens on the client side (i.e., in the browser.) Way back in the day this didn't matter much. The web browser just rendered the HTML encoded web pages that you sent it. Javascript existed, but you couldn't really count on any particular client having it enabled. But times have changed.
Nowadays, for most websites, a ton of stuff happens in the browser. Instead of just sending already baked HTML to the browser for it to render into a web page, you send it some HTML, along with programming code which is then executed in the browser in order to complete the HTML page. The programming code is written in javascript, which all browsers can execute, and which you can count on clients not having turned off (since so little of the web would work if you tried to surf without javascript enabled.) This results in the kind of interactive web pages we have all become accustomed to. You can click on interface elements on a page, and things happen (menus open, new content is fetched from distant servers, slide shows launch, etc...) without having to reload the whole page from the server. Going from a web of static pages to a web of dynamic interactive pages is largely the result of moving code from the server side to the client side of the equation. Web sites become less like "pages" of content and more like traditional desktop "applications".
HTML5 is a not very strictly defined term used to cover a lot of this new(-ish) technology. It means not only the latest version of the HTML standard (the latest HTML tags you can use to mark up the content of your pages thus creating the visual layout,) but also CSS for styling (fonts, colors, etc., and increasingly animations,) and javascript. HTML5 is sort of the catchall term for the technologies underlying this transition from static web pages to dynamic web apps. (Yeah, of course, this is a quick post and not completely accurate, but hopefully gets the general flavor.)
In any case, if I succeed in starting up the blog again, most of the posts are going to be about the client side. Especially Jquery which is (again, not completely accurate, but for our purposes...) a dialect of javascript that makes it easy to write javascript code that works the same in all browsers. I doubt this will all be very interesting. Mainly it will just be a place for me to put links which I think I might need at a later time. But occasionally I'll try to say something more high level about the state of the web and possible futures I see.
I'm interested.
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I used to be proficient on the "server side" of the web equation (hence the blog title), meaning I mostly focused on the server: linux admin, Apache, MySQL, PHP (plus email, dns, and everything else that happens on the server.) I still do all that, but things don't change very much or very quickly inside that technology stack. The other side of the equation is the stuff that happens on the client side (i.e., in the browser.) Way back in the day this didn't matter much. The web browser just rendered the HTML encoded web pages that you sent it. Javascript existed, but you couldn't really count on any particular client having it enabled. But times have changed.
Nowadays, for most websites, a ton of stuff happens in the browser. Instead of just sending already baked HTML to the browser for it to render into a web page, you send it some HTML, along with programming code which is then executed in the browser in order to complete the HTML page. The programming code is written in javascript, which all browsers can execute, and which you can count on clients not having turned off (since so little of the web would work if you tried to surf without javascript enabled.) This results in the kind of interactive web pages we have all become accustomed to. You can click on interface elements on a page, and things happen (menus open, new content is fetched from distant servers, slide shows launch, etc...) without having to reload the whole page from the server. Going from a web of static pages to a web of dynamic interactive pages is largely the result of moving code from the server side to the client side of the equation. Web sites become less like "pages" of content and more like traditional desktop "applications".
HTML5 is a not very strictly defined term used to cover a lot of this new(-ish) technology. It means not only the latest version of the HTML standard (the latest HTML tags you can use to mark up the content of your pages thus creating the visual layout,) but also CSS for styling (fonts, colors, etc., and increasingly animations,) and javascript. HTML5 is sort of the catchall term for the technologies underlying this transition from static web pages to dynamic web apps. (Yeah, of course, this is a quick post and not completely accurate, but hopefully gets the general flavor.)
In any case, if I succeed in starting up the blog again, most of the posts are going to be about the client side. Especially Jquery which is (again, not completely accurate, but for our purposes...) a dialect of javascript that makes it easy to write javascript code that works the same in all browsers. I doubt this will all be very interesting. Mainly it will just be a place for me to put links which I think I might need at a later time. But occasionally I'll try to say something more high level about the state of the web and possible futures I see.
- jim 1-07-2013 5:54 pm
I'm interested.
- L.M. 1-10-2013 1:39 am