Channel9

HTML5 and CSS3 Fundamentals

Background Every Web Developer Needs to Know
Introduction
In this article I'll describe the World Wide Web from a high level perspective,
focusing on how a web page is request and delivered from a web server to a web b
rowser. Then, I want to talk about web browsers, how they interpret the HTML yo
u write, differences between browsers, what are standards and to paraphrase the
old joke "if Standards are so great, why are there so many of them?" Finally, I
'll talk about the thought process behind HTML5 and CSS3, why they were introduc
ed and what they hope to achieve.
A Brief Technical Overview of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web started out as a means for sharing scientific resources like
research documentation between governmental and academic institutions. It took
time for the technologies and practices to evolve beyond its original purpose.
<p>From a technical perspective, the World Wide Web is comprised of several tech
nologies ... first, it involves a simple markup (the Hyper-text Markup Language,
or HTML) to both structure and format textual information. When first introduc
ed its claim to fame was the hyperlink which allowed the publisher of a document
to add a link to other research papers available from across the world, creati
ng a virtual web of information (thus, the name). Second, one or more interlink
ed pages are published to a server that is connected to an open network which we
know today as the Internet.</p>
<p>A protocol was devised that specialized in allowing a request/response-style
communication between two computers. In other words, one user requests a docume
nt by typing an address for a document into a special program called a web brows
er, and the web browser packages up that request and sends it out into the netwo
rk. The request takes the form of a specially formatted packet of data. You ca
n think of this packet of information like a self-addressed stamped envelope --
containing both the address of the information requested and the address where t
hat information should be sent back to. This specially formatted packet is know
n as Hyper-text Transfer Protocol, or rather, HTTP, and for simplicity's sake yo
u can think of it merely as an electronic envelope. See Figure 1 for the types
of information sent in the HTTP Request and HTTP Response messages.</p>
http-message.gif
A diagram of the parts of an HTTP Message
Figure 1. The HTTP Request and Response messages contains important information
that allows communication back and forth between the client and the server.
<p>The HTTP request message is routed through a series of network wires and rout
ers (i.e., devices that know how to forward HTTP messages closer to their destin
ation) spanning the globe using (ideally) the shortest route possible until it a
rrives at its destination, the web server at the address the requestor typed int
o the web browser. The web server responds to the request by locating the reque
sted document or resource (in the figure, the index.html file), packaging it up
using the same HTTP style envelope, then sending the requested document back on
to the network. The connection would only take a fraction of a second and once
the computer served up the request, it would not retain any information about th
at request in its memory. See Figure 2 for a diagram of interactivity between t
he client and server computers.</p>
www-diagram.gif
A diagram of route from the user request to the web server and back again
Figure 2. (1) The HTTP Request is (2) routed across the internet to the (3) serv
er which serves the (4) requested file back in the body of an HTTP Response mess
age. (5) The HTTP Response is routed across the internet to the original request
or. (6) The requested file is parsed and displayed in the user's web browser.
<p>Once the requested document is delivered through the network back to requesto
r, that document is loaded into the web browser. The browser parses through the
HTML and decides how to render (or rather, display) its content and appearance
on the computer screen.</p>
What Are Domain Names?
<p>The request that users type into web browsers originally looked something lik
e this:
http://157.123.23.44/index.htm</p>
<p>Why the series of numbers? Each computer on this network was assigned an add
ress, called an Internet Protocol Address, or IP Address. This was assigned thr
ough a lower-level protocol called Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Prot
ocol, or rather, TCP/IP. It was the foundational technology that allowed reques
ts to be routed to the appropriate server that contained a given resource, or ra
ther, web page. However, because the IP address for a computer would change occ
asionally for a given computer or institution, they devised a system called the
Domain Name System, or rather, the DNS, to turn a friendly name like:
mit.edu
... into the actual "location", like:
18.72.0.3</p>
<p>A system of top-level Domain Names was created ... .edu for educational insti
tutions, .mil for Military, .gov for Government, .net for Network related resour
ces, .org for Non-profit organizations, .com for Commercial organizations, etc.
Later, other countries and a plethora of top-level domains were added and other
s for commercial and other interests.</p>
<p>The web browser will query databases of domain names and their associated IP
Addresses and will translate the requests automatically for the user without his
or her knowledge. Typically, each Internet Service Provider has a Domain Name
System server that can be queried for resolving Domain Names into IP Addresses.
The databases that contain this Domain Name information stay synchronized aroun
d the globe, although sometimes the synchronization process can take minutes or
hours to complete.</p>
The Purpose for Standards Groups
<p>At every step of the way, one or more organizations were formed to help ident
ify standards for these technologies comprised of experts and luminaries who wer
e pushing these technologies forward. They would meet both virtually and in per
son to define and discuss the merits of adding new features to a given standard
and would encourage organizations who were creating hardware and software to fol
low these standards so that products from different vendors could work together
seamlessly. Perhaps one of the most influential and important standards body yo
u will hear about is the W3C, or rather, the World Wide Web Consortium. They we
re one of the groups responsible for the latest version of HTML, version 5. Ano
ther is the WHATWG, or rather, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working
Group, which is comprised of a subset of the W3C and several additional experts
and organizations that have a vested interest in the vitality of the World Wide
Web. The background of HTML5, the previous versions of HTML, as well as the st
andards organizations involved is fascinating because you get a peek into both t
he process and the politics of these organizations.</p>
Recap of the World Wide Web Technical Overview
<p>From a purely technical perspective, you should now understand a few things:<
/p>
First of all, hopefully you now have an answer to the question everyone first st
arting out asks: "why the heck did they make URLs so convoluted? Wouldn't it be
easier to just type in 'microsoft' instead of 'http://www.microsoft.com'?" The
re's an evolution of technologies, and furthermore, it was never intended for us
e by the masses. At some point commercialized and individual access to the inte
rnet dwarfed the intended use, however the technologies created 30 years ago are
still in play.
Second, hopefully you will begin see the purpose of things like http:// ... in w
hich you are saying you want to access a specific channel of traffic, HTTP, or r
ather, World Wide Web traffic, as opposed to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for wo
rking with large files, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for sending email,
and so on.
Third, hopefully you see the purpose of .com, .edu, .net and so on ... at least,
you understand the original purpose, and you understand how those domain names
are translated into the actual IP Addresses that are utilized by routers to move
traffic around the internet to it's intended destination.
Fourth, hopefully you can see that the specifics of HTML - and all other standar
ds - are decided on by a body of individuals who understand what is needed and p
ropose and debate the merits of adding or removing parts of a given specificatio
n. You should also see the purpose for these standards - so that organizations
creating hardware and software to support the World Wide Web can achieve a high
degree of interoperability.
Fifth, hopefully you can see the role that each component plays in the exchange
of documents and other resources ... the web browser is responsible for interact
ing with the end user who requests a document by typing in a web address or clic
ks on a hyperlink. It also packages up that request and begins the process of r
equesting the document from it's host, the computer called the web server. The
message is packaged using the HTTP protocol, which you can think of as an electr
onic envelope geared towards stateless request / response style transmissions be
tween two computers. Routers are special devices that know how to interpret the
address encoded in electronic envelopes, or rather, the HTTP messages, and rout
e them closer to their ultimate destination. A web server is merely a computer
at a given web address that is listening for HTTP requests, and if the address i
s valid, returns the requested document or resource using the same HTTP message
addressing as a response.
One Final Note About Our Overview
<p>Let me add that (a) I distilled this down and over-simplified it to keep it s
imple at a high level. You could spend months or years learning more about any
single component of what I just described in a few sentences, and (b) after 30 y
ears of use and technological advancement, web development has gotten a LOT more
sophisticated. And most pertinent to this series of lessons, web development t
echniques and technologies have become much more sophisticated. While most of t
he underpinnings are still in play, some of the technologies have been refined a
nd expanded.</p>
<p>Take HTML for example. In early versions, HTML was called on to do "double-d
uty" ... it expressed both the structure of a document as well as its aesthetic
layout. In other words, the same syntax defined both the fact that there would
be fie paragraphs separated by a series of headings indicating the relationship
of those paragraphs to each other, AS WELL AS the font types, colors and sizes,
the border around the web page, the rounded corners and other adornments to make
the web page attractive. While scientists and academicians may not be overly c
oncerned about the aesthetics, at least not 30 years ago, now the World Wide Web
is used for eCommerce, web applications that mimic desktop applications, gaming
and more.</p>
<p>More recently, these two responsibilities - of structure and presentation - h
ave been split in two ... HTML should define the structure of the document, and
Cascading Style Sheets should control the presentation, or rather, the style or
aesthetic qualities of a web page. We'll see how this separation of responsibil
ities plays out throughout this course.</p>
===================================================================
How Web Browsers Parse HTML
<p>One final topic I want to talk about that affects modern web development is t
he implementations of various web browsers. As you'll recall, once the requeste
d web page has been returned, it will be parsed by a web browser then displayed
on screen.</p>
There are four major parsing and rendering engines that are popular today.
Trident, the web browser engine from Internet Explorer, is used by many applicat
ions on the Microsoft Windows platform, such as netSmart, Outlook Express, some
versions of Microsoft Outlook, and the mini-browsers in Winamp and RealPlayer.
KDE's open-source KHTML engine is used in KDE's Konqueror web browser and was th
e basis for WebKit, the rendering engine in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome w
eb browsers.
Gecko, the Mozilla project's open-source web browser engine, is used by a variet
y of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox web brow
ser, the Thunderbird e-mail client, and SeaMonkey internet suite.
Opera Software's proprietary Presto engine is licensed to a number of other soft
ware vendors, and is used in Opera's own web browser.
<p>They are *mostly* the same, in so much that a web page will look mostly the s
ame regardless of which web browser it is loaded into. However it is the differ
ences between them that most people discuss because it provides design challenge
s.</p>
What do I mean when I use the terms "parse" and "render"?
<p>The term "parse" refers to the process of breaking apart the HTML document to
better "understand" the instructions coded there in. During this phase, other
resources, like external CSS files or JavaScript files, or images, must be reque
sted so that the browser can get a complete picture of the code it is responsibl
e for ultimately rendering. After all those external resources are downloaded a
nd analyzed, they are typically loaded into the computer's memory as a tree, or
hierarchy, of software objects then passed to the rendering engine component of
the browser - more about that in a moment. When I refer to these hierarchical s
oftware objects, I simply mean that some objects "own" or are parents to other o
bjects ... a simple example might be that a paragraph is a parent to each senten
ce, which is a parent to each word. There might be other tags and graphical ele
ments that the paragraph owns as well. This is simply part of the process of de
ciding what technique the browser will use to ultimately render the HTML to the
screen.</p>
Characteristics of HTML5 Web Pages
<p>Each web page should declare which standard it has promised to adhere to. Th
is is called a DOCTYPE, and it is the reason that we typed this:<br>
<br>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<br>
<br>
... at the very top of our web page. This instruction told any web browser that
may open it that it should be evaluated as an HTML5 document, as opposed to an
HTML document of another version. Every instruction should adhere to the HTML5
specification (which we'll talk about in a moment). If it doesn't, the renderer
may not know how to properly apply the rules of HTML5 to the document and must
drop back into something called "quirks mode" where the browser will take a best
guess on how to best render the web page. "Quirks mode" exists because there a
re plenty of poorly coded HTML page in the world and the web browser wants to tr
y to the best of its ability to render something to the end user. If web browse
rs through up their hands and complained each time a web developer wrote bad cod
e, the World Wide Web experience would be dreadful. Since writing HTML that doe
sn't validate against a standard can produce inconsistent results, web developer
s are strongly encouraged to take great care in the code they write. In fact, m
ost tools that allow you to write HTML pages incorporate a validator to ensure t
he code you write validates against your chosen HTML specification. We'll use a
n HTML5 validator that's available on the internet for free in just a moment.</p
>
<p>Once the document has been parsed, the browser can begin the rendering proces
s. "Render" means that the code will be translated into visual elements on scre
en using algorithms and rules coded into the rendering engine, the components in
the web browser responsible for this activity. The rendering engine will figur
e out how much screen space is available, and will begin to dole out the screen
real estate equitably to lay out the various parts of the page onto the computer
screen. There's much more to it than that, but again I'm just trying to speak
at a very high level about what happens here.</p>
<p>And here is where things start to get messy, because I said all of that to sa
y this: each rendering engine is written by different developers each determinin
g how to satisfy the requirements of the specification in their code. Most of t
he time, your valid HTML5 code will look "close enough" on most browser vendor a
nd versions. However, that's unfortunately not always the case and so it is imp
ortant to set your expectations and give you a little heads up on how to deal wi
th the inevitable situation where you want to use some new feature that is eithe
r supported differently in different browsers or is not supported at all in olde
r browsers.</p>
<p>Let's start with the question if there's a standard in place, why do browser
vendors implement functionality differently? Often this is a matter of interpre
tation of the specification. The specification details how something should wor
k and provides some scenarios. From a technical perspective, there are situatio
ns not covered explicitly by the specification and vendors need to decide how TH
EY will handle it. In other cases, different vendors have different timeframes
on when they plan on supporting the functionality. This has to do often with no
n-technical issues like budgets and resources and release schedules. For exampl
e, I saw a graphic comparing the number of features added to IE10 that were not
in IE9. It was staggering, and strategically IE10 has a goal of supporting the
release of Windows 8.</p>
<p>If you're not aware, you can build Metro-style Windows applications using HTM
L5, CSS3 and JavaScript via the WinRT API. Prior versions of IE9 did not have t
his requirement, and so the feature set it supported was decidedly smaller in pr
eparation for a larger budget and team assigned to IE10.</p>
<p>Couple different interpretations of the specification with the fact that part
s of the specification are not even complete, like I said in the first lesson, a
nd you have a recipe for a divergence of implementations of the standards. Agai
n, much of the standard works correctly.</p>
<p>So, what to do when you as a web developer want to make sure that your web pa
ge is rendered correctly in as many web browsers as possible? First of all, you
need to become aware of those situations where implementations vary between the
rendering engines. Testing your web pages in multiple browsers and on multiple
devices will help identify those in your particular web pages, but over time, a
s you become more familiar with HTML and CSS you'll know where the potholes are.
Secondly, you can take one of two approaches ... the first approach is called
"Graceful Degradation" where you build your ideal web page to design at the late
st version of a target web browser, then use CSS and JavaScript, images and emul
ation scripts that attempt to duplicate the features supported by the latest ver
sions of one or more web browsers. Using this first technique, you are trying t
o get older browsers or current versions of other browsers to do things they are
not capable of using copious sections of alternate HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Y
ou spend a lot of time wrestling with the site to get it as close as possible in
older or less capable browsers.</p>
<p>Alternatively, you could take the "Progressive Enhancement" approach, meaning
you start out by keeping the web page you're authoring as simple and straight f
orward as possible making sure the site looks as good as possible in baseline br
owsers ... in other words, you decide on a set of older web browsers as the base
line, make sure the web page looks good in those browsers, then add in features
that are supported in newer browsers to enhance the web site. In this way you e
nsure that users with older browsers still have a good experience, you focus on
writing good, solid HTML code, and for those who are running newer browsers you
are adding features that will simply enhance their experience. Over time, you r
e-visit the web page's code, replacing those bits those older parts with those p
arts that were merely enhancements. People will eventually upgrade their browse
rs and as they do, your baseline can creep forward. This is an ongoing migratio
n strategy. Most developers agree in principle that this is the right approach,
even if the implementation can be tricky at times. You have to decide whether
some of the things I'll demonstrate here are worth the price you'll pay in alien
ating potential users with older web browsers that don't yet support parts of HT
ML5 and CSS3. You should always be testing your work in multiple web browsers a
cross many different versions to know exactly how your web page performs. And,
do as I say, not as I do, because that is a time-consuming and therefore expensi
ve process. Real professionals take this seriously and I would recommend you do
so, too. You may see me cut corners at times -- do as I say, not as I do.</p>
If you have a captive audience, the experience is a little different. For examp
le, In Windows 8, HTML5 developers can rely on Internet Explorer 10's expanded H
TML5 support to build user interfaces that run as Metro-style applications utili
zing the WinRT API. In this case, you know for a fact where your HTML5 will be
rendered and by whom, and you are free to use the full set of HTML5 features IE1
0 supports without having to worry about other browser vendors and version. Ano
ther example might be that someday you're building web-based intranet applicatio
ns that will run inside of your enterprise on an Intranet. In this case, your I
T department may have standardized on a specific web browser. If this is the ca
se, you are free to use the HTML features supported by that specific vendor and
version of web browser.
Conclusion
Hopefully you can see the issues surrounding HTML5 and CSS3 with regards to thei
r support by various versions and vendors of web browsers and two different thou
ght processes on how to incorporate HTML5 into your own work.
Copyright &copy; 2012-2014 Bob Tabor