Common Web Design Acronyms

By Frank Woodford

This article explores the standard acronyms used in web design today and explains what each one means as well as the technology behind it. It will be a massive help to new starters in the field and could potentially help more experienced user gain a better grasp of the things they are working with.

The web is full of scary technologies but getting a grip on the basic ones will make life a lot easier. As with everything that is connected with computers there are a lot of scary acronyms but we will be taking a look at a few of them and hopefully giving you a boost to your general knowledge.

W3C: The W3C are the World Wide Web Consortium and their goal is to "lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and guidelines that ensure long-term growth and stability". This basically means they try their best to make sure internet technologies actually work and that everyone plays nice out there.

HTML: The most common acronym you will come across in web design is HTML. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. It is now overseen W3C.

HTML is essentially a simplifies programming language that helps computers (or more specifically, browsers) to understand text and what to do with it. It uses a standardised set of "tags" that surround some text to "mark it up" for a certain formatting. An example would be the tag strong which defines the surrounded text as important and generally emboldens the text.

By combining different sets of tags as well as editing their attributes you can soon open the door to thousand of possibilities for just simple text content.

XHTML: This stands for eXtended Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the natural progression from standard HTML and is a big part of the future for the web. It is part of the W3C project "The Semantic Web" and is part of an idea to get several new web technologies understood by browsers and humans and open new doors for what is possible on the internet.

DHTML: Dynamic Hyper Text Markup Language is variation on standard HMTL. It involves a combination of HTML and special scripts (executed on the clients side) to create interactive effects or animation. DHTML also commonly uses CSS to help it define styles.

In today's climate DHTML is most commonly associated with JavaScript as many client based browsers and OS support it.

CSS: As part of the evolution of the web HTML and XHTML are no longer truly used to fully decide the full visual style of a web page, only define its content and how it fits in to a style. To handle the presentation of a site the W3C worked to help create CSS or Cascading Style Sheets.

CSS has many advantages including specifying a layout for all mediums (such as browser, printer and TV) and helps to reduce site loading time and complex page by allow a single file to control every web page on a site.

This article may be of use to you in the future so I recommend you bookmark or print it out just in case you ever think, "I wonder what HTML actually stands for?" I hope it has been of some use and that your future web developments go smoothly.


Frank Woodford is an experienced copywriter from Nottingham, England. He has worked along side many English based companies to generate content for promotional magazines and websites. He also recommends certain companies for web design Nottingham and enjoys basketball and squash in his spare time.
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