I am about to try and design a personal website and I was thinking of just using plain old HTML. I did a bit of reading around and found out a little bit of information on XML and XSLT and it got me thinking.
I want people’s opinions on which is better to design a website. The things to consider are as follows:
I have a little knowledge of HTML (I used to have more, but have not used it in a while).
I have no knowledge at the moment of XML.
I don’t know anything like Java or anything else.
This website will be a small personal one to begin with.
I might want to add this skill to my resume (at some point).
Also, if I was to try to use XML I would have to learn about it, this will take time and money (reading stuff OL, buying books etc), is it worth the investment? Or is it more useful for commercial designers?
Any thoughts on this matter would be very helpful.
XML is an extension of HTML, so if you want to use XML, you’re gonna be using HTML any way. In fact, HTML really is your only choice for basic website design–there’s just nothing else out there. Javascript is for doing cool stuff, and is worthwhile if you want to be a web designer. Java is a compiled language (like C/C++) and is not used for general web design.
XML is not a page display language. It’s a way of marking up data. Generally, XML might be used on the server side to store your documents and such, but the front end would still be written in HTML.
You CAN build XSL stylesheets to convert XML into HTML, but that requires that your customers have a browser with an XML parser built into it, which limits you to Pretty much IE5.0 and above, unless you do the transformations on the server.
The right tool for designing web sites really depends on what kind of web site it is, what kind of skills you have, and who your ISP is. ‘Cheap’ web site hosts won’t allow you to do any server side programming at all. In that case, your only choice is HTML with javascript embedded in it for interactive stuff.
From what I’ve seen of XML, it looks very versatile, though rather more picky than HTML. However, it’s not very widely supported at all. As Sam Stone said, you could use it server side, but anything being viewed by the general public is better off in a language supported by your average run-of-the-mill, crappy-connection-so-I-haven’t- upgraded-my-browser-because-it-would -take-three-days web browser.
It’s frustrating how much of web design is like that – “Wow, this would be great, except half the people on the internet wouldn’t be able to see it.”
IMO, you’re going about this backwards: XML/XHTML are solutions for problems you haven’t got.
In order to build a good personal web page you need to understand the principles of HTML, acquire some Photoshop skills, and learn the mechanics of composition.
Study other people’s web pages; ask yourself what works and what doesn’t in the way they present their content. Ask yourself how you might have consructed the page differently. You can learn an astonishing amount about good design simply by studying bad design, and the web is chock full of inspirational examples.
Once these are under your belt you can make independent decisions as to XML, CSS, JavaScript and the rest.
Depending on what you want your personal site to be, most “advanced” (read: non-html) languages would probably be overkill. Download a few CGI scripts, maybe set up an account with Blogger, and you should be fine.
All I use for most of my sites, are what I said above, and CSS (Webmonkey.com has good tutorials and such). Server side includes (not nearly as special as it sounds) also makes making templates ridiculously easy.
Well just use html. I really don’t see any need of xml or server side languages such as asp,jsp for a personal thingy. Yes you would be wasting alot of time.
There’s really nothing wrong with using just plain HTML–no XML, no XSL, no CSS–if this is a personal site.
You can do all your formatting/design with HTML. The advantage of CSS, though, is that it theoretically saves time by keeping all your formatting info in one place, so that it’s easy to change it. You can define the formatting for a “class” and then assign certain tags to that class instead of having to give it the same formatting specs over and over.
But if this is a personal site–less than 5 pages or so–it’s probably not worth it. That having been said, learning HTML/CSS (and, eventually, scripting languages) looks good on your resume.
At the moment I am ploughing my way through an HTML tutotial and will be making a start on a practice page. I will probably look at XHTML, CSS and Javascript at some point, but not until I have something up and running.
The one thing you can do with CSS that you can’t with plain vanilla HTML (AFAIK) is to get links to appear without being underlined. There was time when I would have a stylesheet (or at least a style) that would do nothing but have links show up unadorned.