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.
NetSurf is an open-source web browser which uses its own layout engine. Its design goal is to be lightweight and portable. NetSurf provides features including tabbed browsing, bookmarks and page thumbnailing.
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, while 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.
A content designer is tasked with communicating information in the best way possible. An effective content designer is expected to be skilled in language(s), psychology, user experience (UX), graphic design, and the technical requirements of front-end development. A content designer is an expert across various media, and is skilled in drafting compelling text, images, and videos.
Google Web Toolkit, or GWT Web Toolkit, is an open-source set of tools that allows web developers to create and maintain JavaScript front-end applications in Java. It is licensed under Apache License 2.0.
A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and styling of web pages.
Morfik Technology Pty Ltd. is an Australian software company that was acquired by Altium in 2010.
A flash of unstyled content is an instance where a web page appears briefly with the browser's default styles prior to loading an external CSS stylesheet, due to the web browser engine rendering the page before all information is retrieved. The page corrects itself as soon as the style rules are loaded and applied; however, the shift may be distracting. Related problems include flash of invisible text and flash of faux text.
Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms including Windows API, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Store and Microsoft Silverlight. It can produce both native code and managed code.
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. Magento source code is distributed under Open Software License. Magento was acquired by Adobe Inc in May 2018 for $1.68 billion.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli software company, publicly listed in the US, that provides cloud-based web development services. It offers tools for creating HTML5 websites and mobile sites using online drag-and-drop editing. Along with its headquarters and other offices in Israel, Wix also has offices in Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Ukraine, and Singapore.
Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service owned by Atlassian. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories.
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for specifying the presentation and styling 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.
Brackets is a source code editor with a primary focus on web development. Created by Adobe Inc., it is free and open-source software licensed under the MIT License, and is currently maintained on GitHub by open-source developers. It is written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Brackets is cross-platform, available for macOS, Windows, and most Linux distributions. The main purpose of Brackets is its live HTML, CSS and JavaScript editing functionality.
Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.
The following table lists notable online software source code playgrounds. A playground allows learning about, experimenting with and sharing source code.
Ionic is an open-source UI toolkit for building cross-platform mobile, web, and desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/TypeScript. It provides a set of pre-designed UI components and tools for building high-quality, interactive applications. Ionic was originally built as a complete open-source SDK for hybrid mobile app development created by Max Lynch, Ben Sperry, and Adam Bradley of Drifty Co. in 2013. The original version was released in 2013 and built on top of AngularJS and Apache Cordova. However, the latest release was re-built as a set of Web Components using StencilJS, allowing the user to choose any user interface framework, such as Angular, React or Vue.js. It also allows the use of Ionic components with no user interface framework at all. Ionic provides tools and services for developing hybrid mobile, desktop, and progressive web apps based on modern web development technologies and practices, using Web technologies like CSS, HTML5, and Sass. In particular, mobile apps can be built with these Web technologies and then distributed through native app stores to be installed on devices by utilizing Cordova or Capacitor.
Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded version control with Git. Users can change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add functionality.
JSFiddle is an online IDE service and online community for testing and showcasing user-created and collaborational HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets, known as 'fiddles'. It allows for simulated AJAX calls. In 2019, JSFiddle was ranked the second most popular online IDE by the PopularitY of Programming Language (PYPL) index based on the number of times it was searched, directly behind Cloud9 IDE, worldwide and in the USA.
