Web development problems:
Ahh...you may think what is wrong with this writer, why did he start with a negative remark. Just listen to me for a while, the best part comes after. So, what I was saying is that in web development, there are 5 major players such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Firefox and you do not have much control over the runtime environment. A web app can work even on opera, mobile browsers, and video game consoles. So, a lot of people to please.
But in the hindsight in web development, it is easier to make cross-platform apps by making web apps that run in the browser.
A brief overview
Some web applications have their logic living on a web server which renders HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create an application. Other applications only utilize the server to create their initial state, download the logic to run the application, and then use the server only to retrieve and store data. Regardless of how web development is done, the basic technologies are Html, CSS, and javascript(and a lot of patience). The interface of a web application is mainly just plain text and that is why web development can make use of any programming language that can text in the form of Html and CSS(Every programming language I know).
How the web works
We have the web browser. The web browser is able to parse and render Html and CSS or execute javascript into the web page. The web browser has to send a request to a web server in order to get a web page to render. This is done through a protocol known as HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol. When a request for a particular resource or URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) is sent to a web server, that web server finds the requested content and sends back a response to the browser. The browser then parses and renders that response, which is what the end user sees in the web browser.
The primary technologies used in web development
Html
Html is the building block of web development.
An entire web page can be built only using Html
HTML consists of a series of tags that define the parts and components of a web page. E.g. <img>, <h1> etc.
A web browser will parse the HTML and use it along with CSS and JavaScript to render a page.
CSS
CSS can be linked to a web page in order to define the styling for that web page.
It is a little challenging to write the perfect css.
Generally there are one or more css files which can used to style a particular webpages.
Javascript
It is a fully functional dynamic language which can be executed directly in the web browser.
It makes web pages more interactive and allows programmers to manipulate web pages and their content.
It can add, remove, change html and css contents. Javascipt is mostly used in Dom manipulation.
Server side rendering
All web pages are rendered on the server and the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of that page is sent to the web browser, where it is parsed and displayed to the user. Server-side rendering simply means that the pages are fully constructed by the logic on the server. So, with server-side rendering, the logic for the application lives almost entirely on the server. As we talked about in the history of the web, this was the original way most web applications worked. Today, technologies like ASP.NET or PHP still mainly utilize this model, although with the use of various JavaScript frameworks, even a server-side rendering technology can be used for client-side rendering.
Client side rendering
Client-side rendering simply means that the content of the web page is constructed in the browser(via JavaScript) instead of on the server.
Api
An API is just a specification of some commands that one program can send to get the other program to do something or return some data. This is especially useful in client-side rendering to send and receive data and to communicate with the brains of the application, which is usually on the server.
This wraps up the brief discussion how the web works.
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