Website technologies

There are literally hundreds of difficult technologies available to the webmaster. Making proper use of these technologies allows the creation of maintainable, efficient and useful web sites. For example, using SSI (server side includes) or CSS (cascading style sheets) a webmaster can change every page on his web site by editing one file.A few of the more common technologies are listed below.

Active Server Pages are used to perform server-side scripting. This is a way to get things done on the web server, as opposed to, say, JavaScript, which lets you get things one on the client (browser). Although there is a Unix and Linux version of ASP, it is primarily intended for use on Microsoft web server based systems. ASP is useful for tasks such as maintaining a database, creating dynamic pages and respond to user queries (and many other things as well). 

 

Common Gateway Interface is one of the older standards on the internet for moving data between a web page and a web server. CGI is by far and away the most commonly used method of handling things like guestbooks, email forms, message boards and so on. CGI is actually a standard for passing data back and forth and not a scripting language at all. In fact, CGI routines are commonly written in interpreted languages such as PERL or compiled languages like C.

 

You use Cascading Style Sheets to format your web pages anyway that you want. CSS is complicated, but the complication pays off by being able to create web pages that look much better than otherwise. One very nice feature is the ability to define formatting commands in a single file, which is then included in all of your web pages. This let's you make one change to modify the look of your entire site.