HTML, CSS and JavaScript

HTML is the basic building block of all websites. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. HyperText is something advanced than simple text, it means plain text embedded with other media types like images, flash animations etc. HTML was the idea of Tim Berners-Lee and is based on SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language) which was used earlier for the same purpose. HTML is the claimed standard for web page display and currently its development is supported by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). HTML is organised in form of tags. Some tags belong to the header and others to the body. The most used header tags are title, meta-tags(description, keywords etc.). The body contains tag used for display of hypertext and that too with correct formatting. HTML is now slowly replaced by a better alternative known as XHTML which is a fusion of HTML and XML.

CSS stands for Cascaded Style Sheet, a recent development in the field of web technologies. CSS is the stylesheet information attached to the HTML pages and provide information about the look and feel of the webpage. It replaces the default styles attached with the tags in a page, set by the browser, with values given by the web designer. For example if you want to change the color of the visited links from purple to some other color or you want an 'on hovering' effect etc. Current implemented Specification of CSS is 2 in Internet Explorer 7 and Mozilla Firefox also supports CSS 3 to some extent.

JavaScript is a Client-side scripting language which in simple words means its a programming lanuage which is compiled (rather interpreted) by the browser at runtime. JavaScript is very similar to C Programming lanuage. JavaScript was developed by Netscape and it has absolutely no relation with Java developed by Sun. It derives its name JavaScript due to a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun. Javascript is used for making the website dynamic. Since it is processed at the client side, so it does not require resources from the server and hence prevents the server from overload and also the user relieves from loading time of content from the server. Use of Javascript has increased considerably over the last few years. Now most of the site implement one or the other use of Javascript for their website. For example - showing popups, verifying form fields, showing some mouse over effects etc. Also, many website today use AJAX which is an implementaion of Javascript.

URL Masking (URL Cloaking)

URL Masking is a process by which your original URL is hidden by another URL. For example you have your homepage at http://yourhost.com/you (Original) and booked any URL Making service with your homepage set as http://yourname.com (Mask) then when you enter the Mask URL you will see the page at Original URL but the address bar will show the Mask URL. To make it easy lets take an example:

The website named szakaly.co.nr is a mask for the true URL domain1030180.sites.fasthosts.com/szakaly08 . So you could see, URL Mask are used to convert long URLs into short and easy ones.

So, how does URL Masking work? URL Masking is implemented using frames. How? An invisible frame (frame having border equal to zero) is used to cover your original page. Also, some text is given in the noframes tag for the the browsers not supporting frames (Ancient browsers) and Search Engines since they could not interpret the frames tag.

For a better understanding of how URL masking works, take a look at the source of the website in the above example. The source starts with some meta tags into the head tag constituting the header information about the website. Following that, there is a frameset tag having the properties of border and framespacing set to zero. Then comes your original URL, embedded in the frame tag and the whole page is displayed by this tag only. Finally there comes noframes tag containing some text about the website for the old browsers and Search Engines discussed above.
noframes tag for the browsers not supporting frames (Ancient browsers) and for Search Engines.

For a better understanding look at the source of the website in the above example. There you can see meta-tags embedded in the head tags which give header information about the website. It is followed by frameset tag which has properties of border and framespacing both set to zero. The original website url is then embedded in the frame src="" tag. At last there are noframes tag having some text for the old browsers and search engines.

Essentials for a website

So what are the necessary things required to have a website up and working. Leaving the most two important thing which is your interest and content of the website they are:

1. Webspace
2. Domain name (or a sub-domain name)

Webspace is some sort of online land where you build your building (read website). This webspace can be taken on rent from webhosts. Though some webhosts provide webspace for free since they have their own ways of making money from the service. Maybe possible some can give ads on your site in a popup or banner form.

Domain name is the name of your website, the name by which it is uniquely identified by the Internet Service Providers (ISP) of your users. For example getfreeweb.blogspot.com has .com as the TLD (Top Level Domain), blogspot as the Domain name and getfreeweb as the Sub-domain name. Domain names are not available for free but there are some free alternatives to them. For example the famous dot tk domain names. Dot tk gives you free domains like example.tk, where .tk is the TLD identifying the country Tokelau, a country in South Pacific.

With this two in hand you can have your own website.