The code and markup language that is used to structure and style content on the web has made great progress in the past 10 years. For Part 4 I will discuss the advancements of HTML, CSS, and Javascript Libraries. For the longest time I had been developing with HTML 4. I was formatting my content with tables and defining the style of the page inside the HTML. CSS came along and really changed the way we make websites. It is hard to believe that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) has only been around since 1996 and is at its third evolution CSS3. It includes many things that make the life of a designer easier like importing fonts and the ability to create 3D imagery among other things. It's counterpart, HTML 5 is helping to turn the web into a semantic one replacing <div> tags with more common sense things like <nav> and <footer>. This will help screen readers, search engines, and web browsers know what type of content is on a page. Below is an example of a site I recently built with HTML5/CSS3. The text looks like it would need to be rendered as an image but it is actually an imported font file with a stroke and two sets of drop shadows to make it appear 3D. All completed with CSS.
Javascript and Javascript Libraries like JQuery have also made things like AJAX possible. Content on a page can be dynamically updated from a database or XML file or anything else really in real time without a page refreshing turning the web into a set of applications rather than pages.
The combination of CSS3, HTML5, and javasript libraries are really changing how the web works and is fostering This has lead to cloud applications like gmail and online calendars that I will discuss in part 5.
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