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The language primarily used in the writing of websites is HTML.
This means that the language which your browser will have to translate once it reaches your computer is HTML, although it is possible that a webpage may have been written using another language, and then converted to HTML ready to view on your screen.
That is a little like the process of 'glossing' where we write pages in GLOSS and then translate them into HTML or XHTML. What we create at the end of this process is a static webpage. This means that the page is stored somewhere in exactly the form it will be displayed on screen.
Another way to write web pages is to write a dynamic webpage, which is created 'on-route' to your screen to meet specfic requirements. An example of this is MySpace, Facebook, or an online shop where you search for an item an then a page is returned with your search results. We will not be making dynamic web pages here as we will use GLOSS to create static webpages.
To newcomers in web design, it may be a little confusing with the terms HTML, XHTML and XML all floating around, being different whilst seemingly linked. I will now introduce some of the differences and similarities, along with a brief history of the three computer languages.
When the internet was born, HTML, short for Hypertext Markup Language, was the language used to create web pages. It is a simple case of (one says, an application of) a very complicated language called SGML. Before 1995 there were different versions of HTML floating around with no single specification being the standard, but in this year a group of people was set up to create the first HTML specification: HTML 2.0. Since then we have now moved on to HTML 4.0 with HTML 5 nearing completion.
XHTML, however, is short for Extensible HyperText Markup Language, and rather than being a descendant of SGML, XHTML is an application of XML. XML is a less flexible language than SGML (it is actually a subset of SGML) but it has a more rigid structure which allows it to be applied in many more situations. XHTML inherits this 'rigidness', and so also inherits the advantages of XML.
You will therefore find that most web pages are written in HTML or XHTML. The two languages are nearly identical, so learning one is pretty much the same as learning the other. The difference between them is that XHTML is more strict than HTML, since it inherits the strictness of XML. There are a few simple rules you can follow to convert HTML to XHTML which will 'sure' up the HTML code to conform to the rules of XHTML. These rules are not covered here but can be easily found on the web. One advantage of using XHTML rather than HTML is that it allows us to easily integrate XML applications such as RSS, MathML, and SVG with our XHTML.
Unsurprisingly, there is more than one way to display mathematics on the web. When writing in XHTML you have the choice between the most commonly used Presentation MathML, the more complicated but deeper Content MathML, the even more complicated and even deeper OpenMath, writing each character individually in Unicode, or even making your own mathematics application using XML.
For a comparison of the different methods please see Section 5: Mathematics on the Web: A Comparison.
The method of writing maths most commonly used is Presentation MathML, shortened to pMathML. This is the method we shall use in this guide, but if you wish to use a different method you should have an idea how to write these in GLOSS by the end of this user guide.
Since all of these maths languages are applications of XML, we shall need to write our pages in XHTML whenever we want to include mathematics.
There are other ways to create web pages other than explictly writing the (X)HTML. You can use a WYSIWYG editor (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) such as Dreamweaver which will write the code for you, whilst you just construct your page as if it were a Word document. Another option is an online page creator which will give you a template for a page, which you just fill in the details for.
The way that we will write web pages is to write a static web page using the GLOSS language, which we then convert into (X)HTML and view in a web browser.
This page is copyright. Web page design and creation by GLOSS.