Thursday, February 28, 2013

Stylistic Rules, Style Sheet Languages

The most used web style sheet is CSS. A web style sheet is a set of styles for designing documents that thereon the Web. An external style sheet is stored in different file of style sheet separated from the documents who links it. Style Sheet Languages (or style languages) expresses the presentation, the looks and formatting of structured documents. There are only two web style sheets in this (2013) generation.
  • CSS, which stands for Cascading Style Sheets, is a style sheet language that can style web pages written in Hyper Text Markup Language or any kind of XML-based language, in other words, an application of Extensible Markup Language. This is the only style language that can be use to style HTML documents. And the most used style sheet language in this time. (2013) The extension of a CSS file is .css which used in external styling, because there are three ways to style the compatible documents for it, the inline style, the internal style sheet and the external style sheet, which are going to explain later.
  • Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) was originally developed to be an XML-based style sheet language. It consists of three parts, it is a set of three different computer languages, a style sheet language, query language and markup language:
    1. XSL Transformations (XSLT) is the most important part of XSL. It's a “style sheet language” used to transform XML into another XML document. Normally, XSLT does that by transforming each XML element into an XHTML element. The .xsl extension is for the path name of an XSLT style sheet file, which used to insert into the <xsl:stylesheet> or <xsl:transform> root element.
    2. XPath, also known as XML Path, is a query language used by XSLT (and some other artificial languages) to access or refer to the parts of an XML document. It's a “query language” for addressing parts of an XML, designed to be used by both XSLT for selecting nodes from an XML document, and XPointer (a.k.a. XML Pointer,) to link to the specific parts of an XML document.
    3. XSL Formatting Objects, also known as XSL-FO, was now formally named as Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) as its generalized style sheet language under it. XSL(-FO) is a “markup language” for specifying formatting semantics which is often used to generate Portable Document Format (PDF) files. An XSL-formatted file can be with .xml extension but the specific extension which was exist to used on their files is an .fo or an .fob file extension.

Web developers knew that the HTML is the most used web development language, and because Cascading Style Sheets is the only style sheet that can design HTML documents, it became the most used web style sheet. A little stylistic HTML script example below that styles with internal style sheet, to know how Cascading Style Sheets works:

HTML Source:

<style type="text/css">
#srssl-sample {
width: 230px;
margin: 0 auto;
background: #808080;
padding: 4px 0;
}

#srssl-header {
background: #FFFF00;
width: 222px;
margin: 0 auto;
text-align: center;
font-size: large;
font-weight: bold;
}

#srssl-container {
width: 222px;
margin: 4px auto;
background: #FFFFFF;
padding: 2px;
}

#srssl-sidebar {
float: left;
width: 64px;
background: #FFC0CB;
font-size: small;
margin-bottom: 20px;
}

#srssl-content {
float: left;
width: 152px;
background: #87CEEB;
margin-bottom: 20px;
padding: 0 3px;
}

.srssl-clear {
clear: left;
background: #FF0000;
height: 3px;
}

#srssl-footer {
width: 218px;
background: blue;
margin: 0 auto;
font-size: small;
color: white;
font-style: italic;
text-align: right;
padding: 0 2px;
}
</style>

<div id="srssl-sample">
<div id="srssl-header">This is a Header</div>
<div id="srssl-container">
<div id="srssl-sidebar">This left column is a sidebar.</div>
<div id="srssl-content">This main column is for the contents.</div>
<div class="srssl-clear"></div>
</div>
<div id="srssl-footer">This is a Footer</div>
</div>

Monday, February 11, 2013

Tags' Symbols and Rules, Markup Languages

Do you know that the first computer language for developing websites that a web developer should learn is a markup language? It is used to markup a document, have symbols and rules for doing elements and attributes of a document, and that's why it is the most used type of computer language on the World Wide Web (simply as WWW or W3,) because without this, you can't markup correctly, such as no link, no table, no title, no description, and no keyword, just a graphical text.

A markup language that have an application, can be called as a "generalized markup". The most used generalized markup in this time is listed below:
  • A Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML for short,) is developed and standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (or ISO) in 1986. Most tags of a SGML does have a start tag and end tag, same to the tags of the SGML standard and SGML-based languages' HTML and XML standard. SGML was extended from Generalized Markup Language (GML). SGML and GML are both systems for organizing and tagging elements, but SGML wasn't based on GML, they are completely different! Because GML has different symbols such ordered list's start :ol tag and end :eol. tag, and most of GML tags doesn't have an end tag such :li. for defining list item, :h1. to define heading 1 and :p. to define a paragraph.
There are many SGML-based languages or applications of a Standard Generalized Markup Language exist now and the most used of those languages are listed below:
  1. Hyper Text Markup Language (also known as HTML,) is have their own set of predefined tags for doing elements and attributes of a document. .html and .htm are the file name extensions for HTML files. The HTML tags that has no end tags can written as just their start tag such <br> without closing it and can be closed as <br/>, all HTML tags are case-insensitive and even the format that you've been made wasn't right, most web browsers will display it correctly. And because of these, HTML doesn't have application.
  2. XML means Extensible Markup Language, originally designed to carry data and have an .xml filename extension. In XML, all elements must properly closed and the tags' capitalization are case-sensitive. The XML standard tags are not predefined as HTML, so you could invent your own tag such start <invented> tag and end </invented> tag, this tag was just invented. There are now many XML-based languages exist because of its proper and well-organized syntax, including the popular XHTML.
    The often used families of markup languages of Extensible Markup Language, also known as XML-based languages or applications, are listed below:
    1. XHTML means Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language, it has the same set of functions and tags as HTML, but with syntax as strict and clean as XML, such a tag that has no end tag in HTML such <br> or <br/> must be properly closed as <br /> and tags' capitalization are case-sensitive like XML, and that's why it's in the family of XML instead of HTML. The filename extensions that build for XHTML files are .xhtml and .xht but XHTML can also use the XML standard and HTML's filename extensions. Yet, the .html filename extension is still the most used.
    2. A computer language, Atom (standard) is used for developing web feeds. Atom documents has a filename extension of .atom, or .xml as it is an aplication of Extensible Markup Language. An HTML document can be linked to an ATOM feed using <link> tag. Atom is more advanced syndication format than RSS.
    3. Rich Site Summary also known as Really Simple Syndication (abbreviated as RSS,) is a family of news feed formats and their documents have .rss or .xml filename extension. The first version of RSS was released in March 1999, it is older than Atom standard which was first published in December 2005, and a former primary method of web content syndication before Atom.