Honours Project: - Napier University

Gregory Huet
Honours Project
99034735 Dr. William Buchanan
4. Theories
This section will introduce principal notions and techniques used during the elaboration of
this project.
4.1 The Web Theory
4.1.1 HTML and JavaScript
As we approach the end of the twentieth century, information is a critical force shaping the
world's economic system. In the next century, the speed with which information is created, its
accessibility, and its myriad uses will cause even more fundamental changes in each nation's
economy. These changes will be the result of technological convergence of the previously
distinct telecommunications, information, and mass media industries.
The principal way to publish on the web is through the use of the HTML 23 language. This
was a major evolution of the web and place the Internet at the level of normal users (not
computing people). The technology involved is a mark-up language based on the use of tags
defining the layout and it is directly interpreted on the user’s computer (client computer).
The HTML is a poor language. It will be replace soon by new technologies like XML 24 .
Anyway, JavaScript is a language which allows to create more functions that’s which include
in the HTML recommendation. Scripting allows creation of interactive elements on screen
for example. This technology is a client side language as the HTML
4.1.2 Dynamic HTML (DHTML)
Dynamic HTML is a collective term for a combination of new Hypertext Mark-up Language
(HTML) tags and options, that will let you create Web pages more animated and more
responsive to user interaction than previous versions of HTML. Much of dynamic HTML is
specified in HTML 4.0. Simple examples of dynamic HTML pages would include:
• Having the colour of a text heading change when a user passes a mouse over it,
• Allowing a user to "drag and drop" an image to another place on a Web page.
Dynamic HTML can allow Web documents to look and act like desktop applications or
Multimedia productions. The features that constitute dynamic HTML are included in
Netscape Communications' latest Web browser, Navigator 4.0 (part of Netscape's
Communicator suite), and by Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer 4.0. While both Netscape
and Microsoft browsers support HTML 4.0, only one of the browsers supports some
additional capabilities. The biggest obstacle to the use of dynamic HTML is that, since many
users are still using older browsers, a Web site must create two versions of each site and serve
the pages appropriate to each user's browser version.
A describes the default style characteristics (including the page layout and font type style and
size for text elements such as headings and body text) of a document or a portion of a
document. For Web pages, a style sheet also describes the default background colour or
23 HTML for Hyper Text Markup Language.
24 XML for eXtended Markup Language.
23