Using external style sheets is a great way to change the whole look and feel of a website without actually altering the sites structure or content. A Cascading style sheet or CSS file is an external file that holds all element properties for your website; so within this file are font sizes, colour schemes, rollover images, background images, page structure, page margins, etc etc. The list is quite literally endless of the things you can control and manipulate within the CSS file. Since web standards (W3C) stated that websites should be constructed using XHTML and CSS, external style sheets have become around 50% of the initial development process.
The great thing about CSS is that it has to be one of the easiest languages to write, it uses plain English to define the element properties; and using a text editor such as Dreamweaver all the properties are made available from a list so you don’t even have to remember them.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that CSS is a simply a basic language, the full potential of CSS is now starting to rise to the surface, with publications such as Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web design (http://www.simplebits.com/), which highlights the advanced layout structures and website effects that can be achieved using this language.
XHTML and CSS is a great starting point for any budding programmer. They teach you the basics and introduce you into other languages such as PHP and Javascript. You don’t need any fancy software to get started. Simply load up notepad. Get yourself a couple of tutorials of the internet, give it a go and see what you can achieve.
This is just a little blog I have put together listing my favourite pieces of open source software, which are available for free to download over the internet.
Mozilla FireFox
FireFox is an award winning web browser and is currently the second most popular web browser used on the internet behind internet explorer.
There are many reasons why I love FireFox, I love the way I can really personalise it. I can make it look the way I want it to; I can add or take away features and tools. Its integration with the Google search engine is very clever, it is not as intrusive as the Google tool bar and the predictive search really speeds up the search process.
My personal favourite thing about FireFox is the add-on ‘Developers toolbar’. This add-on is perfect for web developers and budding developers. It allows you to view website’s CSS and HTML code; it also allows you to validate HTML and CSS code at the click of a button. What I find most useful about this tool is that it allows you to see how sites are constructed and put together. This is a great learning tool as you can recreate aspects into your own sites.
Download from:
http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/firefox/
PHP
PHP is a server-side scripting language used within websites to make them dynamic. What this means is that a user can input information into a website and a result or output is produced. PHP is used to calculate the result.
PHP is a very sophisticated and powerful programming language, and the best thing is its totally free to download and install on your server. Its main advantages are allowing you to create these dynamic pages allowing the user to interact with your site, weather it is just for a simple email subscription or more complex e-commerce website PHP can take care of it.
The reason I like PHP as it is nearly limitless with what you can do with it and your skill and imagination are the only boundaries. As far as programming languages go PHP seems to be easier than others to learn and to grasp hold of the basics, but like all languages it will takes years to master.
Download from: http://www.php.net/downloads.php
VLC Player
The VLC player is quite unique from most media players as it will play virtually any format; from Windows wmv formats to Apple’s mov, the VLC player is truly multiplatform. The player is jam packed with features which will allow you to manipulate the media, it will allow you to split, rotate crop and add images.
The VLC player has one final trick up its sleeve as it can also be used as a server side multimedia streaming media server. When used as a streaming media server it can stream all compatible formats so as a developer you are no restricted to what format to use, also the VLC player can steam live video ideal for gigs or sporting events.
The VLC player is really the only player you will need. It will play most video formats including DVD without the addition of installing any extra codec packs. All this along with the ability of also being installed on a server to become a streaming media server makes this one hell of a bargain at the price of ooh erm let me think, oh that’s right it’s free.
Download from: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
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