HTML: How We See the Web

Many of you are probably familiar with HTML, or at least have heard the term used before. HTML is refereed to as a markup language (HyperText Markup Language) and while it is definitely not a programming language since you do not write programs with it, it is certainly important part of the web any user should understand.

Anyone viewing this page is using some sort of web browser, such as Chrome, Firefox, or IE. Perhaps even a mobile browser on a phone or tablet. All of these browsers serve the same purpose, and that is read HTML documents and display them in a way that is user friendly.

HTML is the foundation of pretty much any webpage on the internet. It is based on putting tags around text to give content both appearance. Here is a basic example of a few common tags.

On line 1, we see the document type declaration, it is often important to specify what version of HTML you are using so the web browser can most accurately display it. On line 2 is where the start of the webpage is defined, and line 14 is where it ends. Next is what is considered the main “body” of your text.

The “h” stands for heading, and the <h1> denotes not exactly the first heading, but the most important one. The second most important heading would be <h2> and on until <h6>. The heading tag is NOT used for simply making a portion of text bigger or stand out more. As search engines crawl through the web and find your page, the page will be usually be indexed based off the content in the html heading tags. This is why it is important to keep relevant information to your page in the headings.

Anytime you want a line break, add another <p> and </p> tag. This will ensure proper formatting regardless of the browser your user has.

On line 11 there is hyperlink tag denoted by <a>, but the site referenced also needs to be stated in the tag, href specifies that URL.

What this basic webpage would look like in a browser:

Seems to get the job done, but I think there needs to be a lot more tags involved to get a website looking a little more friendly. In reality, there is a lot more going on than just HTML on the webpages we go on. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) contributes a good deal to the actual design and appearance of a page, while JavaScript provides interactivity in the site.

Thanks for reading this week’s post, and I hope you learned a thing or two about HTML and how web pages are displayed.

What is “Open Source”?

Source code is what programmers edit to change the various aspects of a software application. When the source code is “open” to the public it means that anyone can look at it or even edit it. This is of course means its free for anyone to manipulate (positively) or use how they please. WordPress is a great example open source application software. Corporation owned software (proprietary software) is the exact opposite open source, it is often illegal to try to study, examine, or reverse-engineer the software licensed to the copyright holder.

Commonly encountered open and closed source software applications.

Why should we care about open source? Of course free software is great (with free legal software being even better) and many open source solutions have become extremely popular and profitable. A great deal of smartphone users having devices with android based operating systems, Cal Poly’s online learning software switching from blackboard to PolyLearn (moodle). Internet explorer has been widely criticized for its gaping security holes in comparison to Firefox and Chrome.

Professionals are finding out that open source is more and more reliable than software licensed by giant billion dollar corporations. The International Space Station just recently announced a change from Windows and Linux for their computers, citing increased reliability.

A big misconception about the idea of open source is that it is only for software. The concept can be applied to just about anything, certainly including computer applications and electronics, but also any product design. Open source medicine, the development of pharmaceuticals, opening up scientific journals to avoid high costs of publication, are all on the brink of development.

Open source could very well be the future for all fields of study. Let me know what you think!

 

 

 

Benefits and Costs of C

Even if you have no experience coding, you may have heard of a programming language called C. Introduced in 1972, it is a very old but extremely popular language that is supported on nearly all devices. As you might imagine, this makes it incredibly useful. Below is a ranking of the most popular programming languages. C is first, also note that there are many other popular languages derived from C!

C is considered a very powerful language, in that it is both lightweight and efficient. This is due to the fact that the language runs very close to the computer’s hardware, while other languages operate “further away” from the processor (think of it as more steps to get to the actual calculations.) Incidentally, this makes more susceptible to security breaches. (“With great power comes great responsibility.”) So if you wanted to design a server where many different people are accessing files, and you only want certain people to have access to certain files, there are better languages than C to accomplish this task. C is capable of achieving the design, there are just multiple security flaws that have been discovered over the recent years.

A recent example of C being utilized in a project is Curiosity, the mars rover. It runs 2.5 million lines of C. Imagine the great task of making sure all that code is bug free and running bug free before sending millions of kilometers to another world. Here is a link to the JPL coding standard used in this project. Potentially interesting to any computer programmers as it is full of great coding standards to follow, and just a fantastic technical document in general!

Thanks for reading this week!