Channel9

HTML5 and CSS3 Fundamentals

Background Every Web Developer Needs to Know
Introduction
In this article I'll describe the World Wide Web from a high level perspective,
focusing on how a web page is request and delivered from a web server to a web
browser. Then, I want to talk about web browsers, how they interpret the HTML
you write, differences between browsers, what are standards and to paraphrase
the old joke "if Standards are so great, why are there so many of them?" Finally,
I'll talk about the thought process behind HTML5 and CSS3, why they were
introduced and what they hope to achieve.
A Brief Technical Overview of the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web started out as a means for sharing scientific resources like
research documentation between governmental and academic institutions. It
took time for the technologies and practices to evolve beyond its original
purpose.
<p>From a technical perspective, the World Wide Web is comprised of several
technologies ... first, it involves a simple markup (the Hyper-text Markup
Language, or HTML) to both structure and format textual information. When first
introduced its claim to fame was the hyperlink which allowed the publisher of a
document to add a link to other research papers available from across the world,
creating a virtual web of information (thus, the name). Second, one or more
interlinked pages are published to a server that is connected to an open network
which we know today as the Internet.</p>
<p>A protocol was devised that specialized in allowing a request/response-style
communication between two computers. In other words, one user requests a
document by typing an address for a document into a special program called a
web browser, and the web browser packages up that request and sends it out
into the network. The request takes the form of a specially formatted packet of
data. You can think of this packet of information like a self-addressed stamped
envelope -- containing both the address of the information requested and the
address where that information should be sent back to. This specially formatted
packet is known as Hyper-text Transfer Protocol, or rather, HTTP, and for
simplicity's sake you can think of it merely as an electronic envelope. See Figure
1 for the types of information sent in the HTTP Request and HTTP Response
messages.</p>
http-message.gif
A diagram of the parts of an HTTP Message

Figure 1. The HTTP Request and Response messages contains important

information that allows communication back and forth between the client and
the server.
<p>The HTTP request message is routed through a series of network wires and
routers (i.e., devices that know how to forward HTTP messages closer to their
destination) spanning the globe using (ideally) the shortest route possible until it
arrives at its destination, the web server at the address the requestor typed into
the web browser. The web server responds to the request by locating the
requested document or resource (in the figure, the index.html file), packaging it
up using the same HTTP style envelope, then sending the requested document
back on to the network. The connection would only take a fraction of a second
and once the computer served up the request, it would not retain any
information about that request in its memory. See Figure 2 for a diagram of
interactivity between the client and server computers.</p>
www-diagram.gif
A diagram of route from the user request to the web server and back again
Figure 2. (1) The HTTP Request is (2) routed across the internet to the (3) server
which serves the (4) requested file back in the body of an HTTP Response
message. (5) The HTTP Response is routed across the internet to the original
requestor. (6) The requested file is parsed and displayed in the user's web
browser.
<p>Once the requested document is delivered through the network back to
requestor, that document is loaded into the web browser. The browser parses
through the HTML and decides how to render (or rather, display) its content and
appearance on the computer screen.</p>
What Are Domain Names?
<p>The request that users type into web browsers originally looked something
like this:
http://157.123.23.44/index.htm</p>
<p>Why the series of numbers? Each computer on this network was assigned
an address, called an Internet Protocol Address, or IP Address. This was assigned
through a lower-level protocol called Transmission Control Protocol / Internet
Protocol, or rather, TCP/IP. It was the foundational technology that allowed
requests to be routed to the appropriate server that contained a given resource,
or rather, web page. However, because the IP address for a computer would
change occasionally for a given computer or institution, they devised a system
called the Domain Name System, or rather, the DNS, to turn a friendly name like:
mit.edu
... into the actual "location", like:

18.72.0.3</p>
<p>A system of top-level Domain Names was created ... .edu for educational
institutions, .mil for Military, .gov for Government, .net for Network related
resources, .org for Non-profit organizations, .com for Commercial organizations,
etc. Later, other countries and a plethora of top-level domains were added and
others for commercial and other interests.</p>
<p>The web browser will query databases of domain names and their
associated IP Addresses and will translate the requests automatically for the user
without his or her knowledge. Typically, each Internet Service Provider has a
Domain Name System server that can be queried for resolving Domain Names
into IP Addresses. The databases that contain this Domain Name information
stay synchronized around the globe, although sometimes the synchronization
process can take minutes or hours to complete.</p>
The Purpose for Standards Groups
<p>At every step of the way, one or more organizations were formed to help
identify standards for these technologies comprised of experts and luminaries
who were pushing these technologies forward. They would meet both virtually
and in person to define and discuss the merits of adding new features to a given
standard and would encourage organizations who were creating hardware and
software to follow these standards so that products from different vendors could
work together seamlessly. Perhaps one of the most influential and important
standards body you will hear about is the W3C, or rather, the World Wide Web
Consortium. They were one of the groups responsible for the latest version of
HTML, version 5. Another is the WHATWG, or rather, the Web Hypertext
Application Technology Working Group, which is comprised of a subset of the
W3C and several additional experts and organizations that have a vested
interest in the vitality of the World Wide Web. The background of HTML5, the
previous versions of HTML, as well as the standards organizations involved is
fascinating because you get a peek into both the process and the politics of
these organizations.</p>
Recap of the World Wide Web Technical Overview
<p>From a purely technical perspective, you should now understand a few
things:</p>
First of all, hopefully you now have an answer to the question everyone first
starting out asks: "why the heck did they make URLs so convoluted? Wouldn't it
be easier to just type in 'microsoft' instead of 'http://www.microsoft.com'?"
There's an evolution of technologies, and furthermore, it was never intended for
use by the masses. At some point commercialized and individual access to the
internet dwarfed the intended use, however the technologies created 30 years
ago are still in play.
Second, hopefully you will begin see the purpose of things like http:// ... in which
you are saying you want to access a specific channel of traffic, HTTP, or rather,

World Wide Web traffic, as opposed to FTP (File Transfer Protocol) for working
with large files, SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) for sending email, and so
on.
Third, hopefully you see the purpose of .com, .edu, .net and so on ... at least, you
understand the original purpose, and you understand how those domain names
are translated into the actual IP Addresses that are utilized by routers to move
traffic around the internet to it's intended destination.
Fourth, hopefully you can see that the specifics of HTML - and all other standards
- are decided on by a body of individuals who understand what is needed and
propose and debate the merits of adding or removing parts of a given
specification. You should also see the purpose for these standards - so that
organizations creating hardware and software to support the World Wide Web
can achieve a high degree of interoperability.
Fifth, hopefully you can see the role that each component plays in the exchange
of documents and other resources ... the web browser is responsible for
interacting with the end user who requests a document by typing in a web
address or clicks on a hyperlink. It also packages up that request and begins the
process of requesting the document from it's host, the computer called the web
server. The message is packaged using the HTTP protocol, which you can think
of as an electronic envelope geared towards stateless request / response style
transmissions between two computers. Routers are special devices that know
how to interpret the address encoded in electronic envelopes, or rather, the HTTP
messages, and route them closer to their ultimate destination. A web server is
merely a computer at a given web address that is listening for HTTP requests,
and if the address is valid, returns the requested document or resource using the
same HTTP message addressing as a response.
One Final Note About Our Overview
<p>Let me add that (a) I distilled this down and over-simplified it to keep it
simple at a high level. You could spend months or years learning more about any
single component of what I just described in a few sentences, and (b) after 30
years of use and technological advancement, web development has gotten a LOT
more sophisticated. And most pertinent to this series of lessons, web
development techniques and technologies have become much more
sophisticated. While most of the underpinnings are still in play, some of the
technologies have been refined and expanded.</p>
<p>Take HTML for example. In early versions, HTML was called on to do
"double-duty" ... it expressed both the structure of a document as well as its
aesthetic layout. In other words, the same syntax defined both the fact that
there would be fie paragraphs separated by a series of headings indicating the
relationship of those paragraphs to each other, AS WELL AS the font types, colors
and sizes, the border around the web page, the rounded corners and other
adornments to make the web page attractive. While scientists and academicians
may not be overly concerned about the aesthetics, at least not 30 years ago,

now the World Wide Web is used for eCommerce, web applications that mimic
desktop applications, gaming and more.</p>
<p>More recently, these two responsibilities - of structure and presentation have been split in two ... HTML should define the structure of the document, and
Cascading Style Sheets should control the presentation, or rather, the style or
aesthetic qualities of a web page. We'll see how this separation of
responsibilities plays out throughout this course.</p>
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How Web Browsers Parse HTML
<p>One final topic I want to talk about that affects modern web development is
the implementations of various web browsers. As you'll recall, once the
requested web page has been returned, it will be parsed by a web browser then
displayed on screen.</p>
There are four major parsing and rendering engines that are popular today.
Trident, the web browser engine from Internet Explorer, is used by many
applications on the Microsoft Windows platform, such as netSmart, Outlook
Express, some versions of Microsoft Outlook, and the mini-browsers in Winamp
and RealPlayer.
KDE's open-source KHTML engine is used in KDE's Konqueror web browser and
was the basis for WebKit, the rendering engine in Apple's Safari and Google's
Chrome web browsers.

Gecko, the Mozilla project's open-source web browser engine, is used by a

variety of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox web
browser, the Thunderbird e-mail client, and SeaMonkey internet suite.
Opera Software's proprietary Presto engine is licensed to a number of other
software vendors, and is used in Opera's own web browser.
<p>They are *mostly* the same, in so much that a web page will look mostly the
same regardless of which web browser it is loaded into. However it is the
differences between them that most people discuss because it provides design
challenges.</p>
What do I mean when I use the terms "parse" and "render"?
<p>The term "parse" refers to the process of breaking apart the HTML document
to better "understand" the instructions coded there in. During this phase, other
resources, like external CSS files or JavaScript files, or images, must be requested
so that the browser can get a complete picture of the code it is responsible for
ultimately rendering. After all those external resources are downloaded and

analyzed, they are typically loaded into the computer's memory as a tree, or
hierarchy, of software objects then passed to the rendering engine component of
the browser - more about that in a moment. When I refer to these hierarchical
software objects, I simply mean that some objects "own" or are parents to other
objects ... a simple example might be that a paragraph is a parent to each
sentence, which is a parent to each word. There might be other tags and
graphical elements that the paragraph owns as well. This is simply part of the
process of deciding what technique the browser will use to ultimately render the
HTML to the screen.</p>
Characteristics of HTML5 Web Pages
<p>Each web page should declare which standard it has promised to adhere to.
This is called a DOCTYPE, and it is the reason that we typed this:<br>
<br>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<br>
<br>
... at the very top of our web page. This instruction told any web browser that
may open it that it should be evaluated as an HTML5 document, as opposed to
an HTML document of another version. Every instruction should adhere to the
HTML5 specification (which we'll talk about in a moment). If it doesn't, the
renderer may not know how to properly apply the rules of HTML5 to the
document and must drop back into something called "quirks mode" where the
browser will take a best guess on how to best render the web page. "Quirks
mode" exists because there are plenty of poorly coded HTML page in the world
and the web browser wants to try to the best of its ability to render something to
the end user. If web browsers through up their hands and complained each time
a web developer wrote bad code, the World Wide Web experience would be
dreadful. Since writing HTML that doesn't validate against a standard can
produce inconsistent results, web developers are strongly encouraged to take
great care in the code they write. In fact, most tools that allow you to write
HTML pages incorporate a validator to ensure the code you write validates
against your chosen HTML specification. We'll use an HTML5 validator that's
available on the internet for free in just a moment.</p>
<p>Once the document has been parsed, the browser can begin the rendering
process. "Render" means that the code will be translated into visual elements on
screen using algorithms and rules coded into the rendering engine, the
components in the web browser responsible for this activity. The rendering
engine will figure out how much screen space is available, and will begin to dole
out the screen real estate equitably to lay out the various parts of the page onto
the computer screen. There's much more to it than that, but again I'm just trying
to speak at a very high level about what happens here.</p>

<p>And here is where things start to get messy, because I said all of that to say
this: each rendering engine is written by different developers each determining
how to satisfy the requirements of the specification in their code. Most of the
time, your valid HTML5 code will look "close enough" on most browser vendor
and versions. However, that's unfortunately not always the case and so it is
important to set your expectations and give you a little heads up on how to deal
with the inevitable situation where you want to use some new feature that is
either supported differently in different browsers or is not supported at all in
older browsers.</p>
<p>Let's start with the question if there's a standard in place, why do browser
vendors implement functionality differently? Often this is a matter of
interpretation of the specification. The specification details how something
should work and provides some scenarios. From a technical perspective, there
are situations not covered explicitly by the specification and vendors need to
decide how THEY will handle it. In other cases, different vendors have different
timeframes on when they plan on supporting the functionality. This has to do
often with non-technical issues like budgets and resources and release
schedules. For example, I saw a graphic comparing the number of features
added to IE10 that were not in IE9. It was staggering, and strategically IE10 has
a goal of supporting the release of Windows 8.</p>
<p>If you're not aware, you can build Metro-style Windows applications using
HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript via the WinRT API. Prior versions of IE9 did not have
this requirement, and so the feature set it supported was decidedly smaller in
preparation for a larger budget and team assigned to IE10.</p>
<p>Couple different interpretations of the specification with the fact that parts
of the specification are not even complete, like I said in the first lesson, and you
have a recipe for a divergence of implementations of the standards. Again,
much of the standard works correctly.</p>
<p>So, what to do when you as a web developer want to make sure that your
web page is rendered correctly in as many web browsers as possible? First of all,
you need to become aware of those situations where implementations vary
between the rendering engines. Testing your web pages in multiple browsers
and on multiple devices will help identify those in your particular web pages, but
over time, as you become more familiar with HTML and CSS you'll know where
the potholes are. Secondly, you can take one of two approaches ... the first
approach is called "Graceful Degradation" where you build your ideal web page
to design at the latest version of a target web browser, then use CSS and
JavaScript, images and emulation scripts that attempt to duplicate the features
supported by the latest versions of one or more web browsers. Using this first
technique, you are trying to get older browsers or current versions of other
browsers to do things they are not capable of using copious sections of alternate
HTML, CSS and JavaScript. You spend a lot of time wrestling with the site to get it
as close as possible in older or less capable browsers.</p>

<p>Alternatively, you could take the "Progressive Enhancement" approach,

meaning you start out by keeping the web page you're authoring as simple and
straight forward as possible making sure the site looks as good as possible in
baseline browsers ... in other words, you decide on a set of older web browsers
as the baseline, make sure the web page looks good in those browsers, then add
in features that are supported in newer browsers to enhance the web site. In this
way you ensure that users with older browsers still have a good experience, you
focus on writing good, solid HTML code, and for those who are running newer
browsers you are adding features that will simply enhance their experience.
Over time, you re-visit the web page's code, replacing those bits those older
parts with those parts that were merely enhancements. People will eventually
upgrade their browsers and as they do, your baseline can creep forward. This is
an ongoing migration strategy. Most developers agree in principle that this is the
right approach, even if the implementation can be tricky at times. You have to
decide whether some of the things I'll demonstrate here are worth the price
you'll pay in alienating potential users with older web browsers that don't yet
support parts of HTML5 and CSS3. You should always be testing your work in
multiple web browsers across many different versions to know exactly how your
web page performs. And, do as I say, not as I do, because that is a timeconsuming and therefore expensive process. Real professionals take this
seriously and I would recommend you do so, too. You may see me cut corners at
times -- do as I say, not as I do.</p>
If you have a captive audience, the experience is a little different. For example,
In Windows 8, HTML5 developers can rely on Internet Explorer 10's expanded
HTML5 support to build user interfaces that run as Metro-style applications
utilizing the WinRT API. In this case, you know for a fact where your HTML5 will
be rendered and by whom, and you are free to use the full set of HTML5 features
IE10 supports without having to worry about other browser vendors and version.
Another example might be that someday you're building web-based intranet
applications that will run inside of your enterprise on an Intranet. In this case,
your IT department may have standardized on a specific web browser. If this is
the case, you are free to use the HTML features supported by that specific
vendor and version of web browser.
Conclusion
Hopefully you can see the issues surrounding HTML5 and CSS3 with regards to
their support by various versions and vendors of web browsers and two different
thought processes on how to incorporate HTML5 into your own work.
Copyright &copy; 2012-2014 Bob Tabor