Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design ; authoring, including standardised code and proprietary software; user experience design ; and search engine optimization. Often many individuals will work in teams covering different aspects of the design process, although some designers will cover them all. The term "web design" is normally used to describe the design process relating to the front-end design of a website including writing markup. Web design partially overlaps web engineering in the broader scope of web development. Web designers are expected to have an awareness of usability and be up to date with web accessibility guidelines.
A HTML editor is a program used for editing HTML, the markup of a web page. Although the HTML markup in a web page can be controlled with any text editor, specialized HTML editors can offer convenience, added functionality, and organisation. For example, many HTML editors handle not only HTML, but also related technologies such as CSS, XML and JavaScript or ECMAScript. In some cases they also manage communication with remote web servers via FTP and WebDAV, and version control systems such as Subversion or Git. Many word processing, graphic design and page layout programs that are not dedicated to web design, such as Microsoft Word or Quark XPress, also have the ability to function as HTML editors.
Jeffrey Zeldman is an American entrepreneur, web designer, author, podcaster and speaker on web design. He is the co-founder of A List Apart Magazine and the Web Standards Project. He also founded the design studios Happy Cog and studio.zeldman, and co-founded the A Book Apart imprint and the design conference An Event Apart.
Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of standardized best practices for building web sites, and a philosophy of web design and development that includes those methods.
Molly E. Holzschlag was an American author, lecturer and advocate of the Open Web. She wrote or co-authored 35 books on web design and open standards, including The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web. She was nicknamed the "Fairy Godmother of the Web".
The Markup Validation Service is a validator by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows Internet users to check pre-HTML5 HTML and XHTML documents for well-formed markup against a document type definition. Markup validation is an important step towards ensuring the technical quality of web pages. However, it is not a complete measure of web standards conformance. Though W3C validation is important for browser compatibility and site usability, it has not been confirmed what effect it has on search engine optimization.
Dave Shea is a Canadian web designer and co-author of The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web.
A List Apart is a webzine that explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices.
Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The test page was released on 13 April 2005 by the Web Standards Project. The Acid2 test page will be displayed correctly in any application that follows the World Wide Web Consortium and Internet Engineering Task Force specifications for these technologies. These specifications are known as web standards because they describe how technologies used on the web are expected to function.
The Web Standards Project (WaSP) was a group of professional web developers dedicated to disseminating and encouraging the use of the web standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium, along with other groups and standards bodies.
Tableless web design is a web design method that avoids the use of HTML tables for page layout control purposes. Instead of HTML tables, style sheet languages such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are used to arrange elements and text on a web page.
Progressive enhancement is a strategy in web design that puts emphasis on web content first, allowing everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, whilst users with additional browser features or faster Internet access receive the enhanced version instead. This strategy speeds up loading and facilitates crawling by web search engines, as text on a page is loaded immediately through the HTML source code rather than having to wait for JavaScript to initiate and load the content subsequently, meaning content ready for consumption "out of the box" is served immediately, and not behind additional layers.
Elizabeth Castro, sometimes known as Liz Castro, is an American author and translator best known for her books aimed to educate the reader on particular aspects of website development, such as HTML and Perl. From 1987 to 1993 Castro lived in Barcelona and managed the translation of computer programs. In 1993 she moved back to the United States to write books about using the internet and World Wide Web.
WYMeditor is an open-source WYSIWYM text editor written in the JavaScript programming language for editing content on web pages. It is based on the jQuery JavaScript framework. It differs from other embeddable text editors such as FCKeditor and TinyMCE in that it concentrates on the semantics and meaning of content leaving out visual details. Unlike WYSIWYG editors, it explicitly shows the XHTML structure of content to the user.
CSS image replacement is a Web design technique that uses Cascading Style Sheets to replace text on a Web page with an image containing that text. It is intended to keep the page accessible to users of screen readers, text-only web browsers, or other browsers where support for images or style sheets is either disabled or nonexistent, while allowing the image to differ between styles. Also named Fahrner image replacement for Todd Fahrner, one of the persons originally credited with the idea of image replacement in 2003.
Designing with Web Standards, first published in 2003 with revised editions in 2007 and 2009, is a web development book by Jeffrey Zeldman. The book’s audience is primarily web development professionals who aim to produce design work that complies with web standards. The work is used as a textbook in over 85 colleges.
Peachpit is a publisher of books focused on graphic design, web design, and development. Peachpit's parent company is Pearson Education, which owns additional educational media brands including Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, and New Riders.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML. CSS is a cornerstone technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and JavaScript.
The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web is a book by web designers Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag, published in 2005.
In web development, the CSS box model refers to how HTML elements are modeled in browser engines and how the dimensions of those HTML elements are derived from CSS properties. It is a fundamental concept for the composition of HTML webpages. The guidelines of the box model are described by web standards World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifically the CSS Working Group. For much of the late-1990s and early 2000s there had been non-standard compliant implementations of the box model in mainstream browsers. With the advent of CSS2 in 1998, which introduced the box-sizing property, the problem had mostly been resolved.
