Going Beyond Html
...HTML
In the early years of "The Web", HTML documents presented text and pictures in a static manner like a newspaper. Since that humble beginning newer technologies have helped designers to bring static pages to life: Scripting languages like JavaScript can programmatically manipulate web pages. Powerful scripting languages like Perl, PHP, and ASP can provision web pages with data from databases. Most recently, the addition of multimedia files have altered the user's experience even more.
This paper reviews in greater detail technologies that have helped enrich the user's experience beyond a simple web page and to compare and contrast those technologies where it is effective to do so.
Java vs. JavaScript
Many people use the words Java and JavaScript interchangeably or confuse the two. Java and JavaScript are both similar and yet very different depending on how one views them. Let's take a look at their history.
James Gosling of Sun Microsystems created Java, an Object Oriented Programming (OOP) language.. Netscape created the JavaScript language, also an OOP language. JavaScript and Java are distant cousins. They share a similar syntax and many of their programming structures are similar. However, JavaScript contains a much smaller and simpler set of reserved words than Java.
The main difference between the two can be summarized like this: Java is a much larger and more complicated language that creates "standalone" applications while JavaScript must be placed inside an HTML document to function.
There are also differences in how source statements are converted to executing code, some of which affects the way the users sees each language when surfing the net. Java must be compiled into what is known as a byte code before it can be run. The compilation checks the source statements for errors, which must be corrected before the program can run.
JavaScript...
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