In order to create a very simple program for organizing images on this site, for generating the 'static' html without the use of a server (for CD use, for ex), for other things, a host of different technologies were employed. It was thought it might be useful to repeat some of that experience, here, and to help avoid any similar mistakes and in order that one might learn from fairly established techniques and, perhaps, move forward more quickly on your own projects if you are new to these technologies.

It might seem that a lot of different things are involved for such a simple project, covering everything from web technologies to established programming languages, to proprietary things like, Flash. But to use one, to any degree, is to come to rely on the other. Regular expressions, for example, are important in certain fairly well-defined situations, and are available to any number of languages, online or not. Once one begins with XML, one winds up exploring XSLT, and the parts of each. It's all related. When one is finished, in order to a simple job, it required parts of a number of technologies.

A number of technologies, basically for the worldwide internet, are now being conceptualized and promoted by an international organization called the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, for short. What the W3C produces, in cooperation with various fims, experts, consultants, and whoever else, are written standards - conceptual ideas, to be implemented by those companies, college labs, or anyone else. This is covered in more detail.

Pedagogy is a contentious issue - how one teaches or explains something to those new to the subject. Does one begin an apprenticeship by example, without explaining much, and then explaining in more detail as the examples go by. Do one not explain anything, but commit definitions and design notions to memory, by rote. Certainly, obviously, some will be critical of any one else's approach, as I might be of theirs. And this is covered in more detail.

I also added some persistent styles for these pages, selected from the dropdown box, above. Some people had written that they had trouble with the font, background, and whatnot. And this will allow the viewer to choose for themselves.

So, I'll briefly mention the assorted technologies, below. And then you can link, from there, to specific pages.

If one can assume familiarity with HTML, the mark-up used for internet web pages, then XML is like HTML in that it uses tags/attributes. But while it could be used, the more presentational tags like the ubiquitous HTML TABLE are generally avoided in XML. So, typically, XML tends to look only like a table of contents, a one-side tree, scoped within nested tags.

The technology to take this XML tree and make it a full HTML page is called, XSLT. In a way like flexible and comprehensive server-side PERL, ASP, etc., the XML is treated like raw data, and filled into 'holes', or 'lines on the form', by this intermediate technology on the server. But XSLT is more than that, and different. It doesn't need a server, and can be run on a desktop machine or 'mobile'. And XSLT is a full programming/scripting language, of the declarative type (variables can only be used by resort to recursion, for ex). The XML is fed into the XSLT processor along with the XSLT transform/program that you have written. And HTML may be produced as a result.

A technology purchased years ago, from England(?), by Macromedia shows up increasingly on the web by way of a replacement for animated .gif banner ads. It's called, Flash. While presentation of content has not always been its strong suit, presentation of snippets, or of basic catalog headings, is more something it can do. And in line with that, an effort was made to create a 'remote control' to move through a slide presentation on this site, utilizing javascript, somewhat sucessfully, as the means of communication between Flash and the browser.

The script of all scripts, in a way, on the web. It's tightly woven into the browser, should work without proprietary extensions on any browser or device, and is typically used for collection of 'cookie' information and the creation and presentation of 'dynamic' drop down menus on web sites; along with the annoying desire of various commercial site owners to pop up ad windows, everywhere.

Microsoft Access is a useful front end for entering and manipulating data. It is built around a combination of Visual Basic programming, SQL queries, and works best if you yourself have designed a fairly normalized database 'schema'. The real work is done with the interface of forms and reports, with forms typically coming in for the most use.
 

Used with something like Access, any of Microsoft's Office Suite programs, or just in the development editor directly, something like Visual Basic provides a lot of built-in functionality. And beyond that, it can be extended by making direct calls to libraries in Windows, whether Windows core libraries (like user32, or kernel32), or just any library around. In like manner, ActiveX controls can be provided to expand on the basic listboxes and the like, with one, in particular, called Treeview, being preferred by many.

HTML. This is the mark-up language used to present web pages. It's a nested set of tags/commands and parameters/attributes, some of which have to be closed, some which don't. A 'non-presentation' mark-up language, XML, is stricter on what needs to be closed, and typically is used as a bare bones data document. A sort of hybrid, called XHTML, which includes some extensions, the idea of the namespace from XML, and otherwise the stricter rules of XML over HTML, is the replacement and/or next generation of the HTML standard. By making HTML compatible, as it were, with XML syntax, the new XHTML can be handled with parsers and programs already set up to deal with XML, directly.

While the use of TABLE, in particular, has tended to blur the difference in roles, HTML was preferred, by many, to be just a bare bones mark-up, like XML has become. The presentation, the coloring, the positioning on the page, and so on, was to be left exclusively to style sheets, called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).