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Web Design - browsers and plugins

What you see on the web.

... code

The web is continues to change apace and the code (which defines the look of the page) has had a lot added to it over only a few years. Along with that, quite a bit of the code has been deprecated, is becoming obsolete and will soon not work at all.

... platform

Depending on whether you're on a PC, a Mac or a high-end workstation, you will get different results from the same code ... sometimes the differences are tiny, sometimes they are extraordinary.

... browsers

Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera and others can each read the same code and give wildly different results. Different versions of each browser respond differently as well.

... css

Does the title of this page look something like the illustration below?

If not, or if all the text looks a bit like Times New Roman your current browser may not support Cascading Style Sheets (css) which are being used more and more widely.

Style sheets are popular for two main reasons: you can change the entire look of a site from one instruction as with "styles" in Word or other text programs; and, as css is defined in one central document, indivdual pages can be smaller and so faster to download.

... php & sql

It may not be apparent but this site uses minimal php throughout; the code for the header and footer of each page is sourced from single documents rather than written out on each individual page. Changes are far easier and there are many other applications.

php code can be used to acces on-line sql-generated databases. Enormous ammounts of information can be stored about huge numbers of individual items and the details written to the screen. Many large sites which offer many items or services with lots of specific information use sql databases to store and retrieve the data.