Website Articles

There are two types of web language, client side languages run on the visitor's browser, server side languages run on the webserver itself. The great thing about server side languages is that it doesn't matter what software your visitors are using to visit your site, all of the difficult work is done on your webserver. You do not have to worry about what browser your visitor is using and what plugins they have. If you use a hosting company, it will usually mean you have to pay a bit more for your hosting package to be able to use server side languages.

Back in the early days of commercial web design, the web design companies would either charge their customers for every page that they created or the ones that were more results focussed would charge for every hit they received in a certain time period. Both of these charging methods led to more pages being created than were necessary and hence the idea of an intro page was invented.

There are two types of web language, server side languages run on the webserver itself and are used for very dynamic web pages, client side languages run on the visitors browser itself. For this reason, your visitors need to have the right browser software to run your client side languages.

It amazes me time and time again that I see so many people struggling to program a website to do what they want, but the language they are using has too many restrictions. It also amazes me when I see a website that would be so much better if they'd just used a different approach or a different tool.

Unlike Javascript and other web languages, Flash and Shockwave will work absolutely identically on every browser that has the flash and shockwave plugins. This is because the plugins are created by the companies that own the languages themselves. Javascript, however, is implemented by whoever is making the browser so differences can appear based on the different interpretations of the language standard.

This does not mean that you should drop javascript, or anything else, and start using Flash or Shockwave. Flash and Shockwave are designed for different tasks.