Computer Programmers are used to working with a multi-tier system to bring efficiencies to the user and system. These complex systems break apart a program into three or more tiers usually. There is a data tier, a business logic tier, and a display tier. Depending upon your view, there are a couple of ways to looks at a web page as that three tier system. We’ll look at one of these methodologies for a logical organization.
The HTML document is the data tier. With HTML we have the content that needs to be shared. We don’t worry about how it will look, only how the information is organized. Now a default look is defined by each browser, which is why things are sometimes a little different from browser to browser. To really create a design, we’ll need to customize the presentation, which we’ll look at in just a minute.
We can use JavaScript for error detection of form data, updating content, and more. In this manner, JavaScript performs our business logic.
The presentation layer changes how the data looks to the end user. This is done with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), with CSS we can change the way our content looks.
By separating out the web pages into those three areas, it becomes easier to manage and work with because it mimics what we know and understand from Computer Science methods.
The Data
How we store the data is by using the HTML structure. Using the structure allows us to organize our data into manageable pieces.
Some people will say the “program” HTML, but HTML is not a programming language. Rather HTML as marking up our data binding the data and provide meaning to it.
The HTML specification builds the web page structure as a text document, using a series of tags – which we’ll learn about in up coming weeks.
HTML as Data Markup was originally found on Access 2 Learn
