A question for web designers and programmers

[epath13]

I know I could have gone to some web design website or what not but I already know people here, so I ask if I don't get answers than we'll see. I'm as usually trying to do something that I am absolute idiot in and I'm trying to do it a wrong way for 100s of times expecting different results.
I want to put a contact form on my website with captcha without knowing anything about anything. I know how to design websites alright, static ones but when it comes to dynamic content my head starts spinning.

1. Why does dynamic content requires a server?

2. Which form is safer java or php?

3. What is the difference between java and php?

I think those are all questions for now...

 

[ptogrph17]

You posted a year ago, did you find the info you were looking for? In my experience doing thing wrong if a very large portion of programming/HTML/CSS, especially when you're learning. I know web design and can post some good links if anyone is interested.

 

[pacman]

I can answer the first question. In a Python class that I am it, we had to make our own online mad-libs game using CGI. In my solution, a random madlib was picked from a file on a server. When the user entered information, the python script on the server computed the results and then displayed them back to the user. Basically, a server is required because it does the behind-the-scenes computation of the web page.

I can't answer the rest as I am not very familiar with either Java or PHP.

 

[epath13]

You posted a year ago, did you find the info you were looking for? In my experience doing thing wrong if a very large portion of programming/HTML/CSS, especially when you're learning. I know web design and can post some good links if anyone is interested.

Yeah... I abandoned the mail form idea, too much work for now... Even though I might be exaggerating I hope I'll get my websites out (the way they are) this month. And please share the links if you have them. My sites are on some server, so technically I can test dynamic content there, that's not an issue anymore. I'm still a little bit freaked out about mail forms hijacking. I wanted to have one of those captcha things on it, but then decided just to make a image link with email... I don't really know how hijacking works, so I'm not even sure if it is a safer option but for now, I don't expect a lot of traffic in the beginning, so I guess it could work. Later I will probably try to put a form on it... Or, do through some mail form company, right now I have no cash or need for it. Do you know how hijacking works exactly?

 

[JohnnyBravo]

I've just read up on the hijacking, since I wasn't sure what it was that you meant, but it seems it can be easily avoided with some simple validation on the user's input. Apparently its injecting additional headers into the email field, which are then added to the email, example:

Imagine your form:

Email: [email protected]
CC: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Message: Hey! Great site!

and then when the user presses the submit button, the code behind the page receives the input and puts this into an e-mail that it will send, now that the CC's are added to the email, the mail will also be sent to all the recipients in there.
I've probably given a lousy explanation, here is where I read it and where you may find a better one: How to Prevent Email Injection in Your PHP Mail Form Scripts (thesitewizard.com)

As for the Java vs PHP, it doesn't really matter which you use in terms of safety. It depends on how its built more than on what language is used.
I would say you always go for PHP for a simple mailform (unless the rest of your application is already written in Java).
From my experience Java has alot more surrounding it, and is not half as easy to get setup with as PHP is. When building in PHP you can just fire up the good old notepad, write your code and upload it to a server and it works. For java you probably need alot of server configurations and a client to properly work with it.

There are also alot of differences between the two languages and I wouldn't know where to start; If you want you can read here for more technical and actual differences between them: What are the differences between PHP and Java? - Stack Overflow
If you would like to know more about it or would like to elaborate on the above, feel free to ask.

 

[ptogrph17]

Hi,

I don't really know a lot about hijack/hack prevention except for form validation. If you're choosing between PHP and Java I would go with PHP because it's very widely used for web development and you shouldn't need to do anything special with your host to make it work. I've tried to use a Python web framework on a lower end host and it was hard because the host didn't have very good support for Python, which apparently only accounts for 0.2% of the web programming language market share. Using Java sounds like it would be more difficult than PHP to me because it's a generic programming language(so is Python) so you might have to have a special environment for it to work because it's used more for heavy duty web apps, whereas PHP is sort of de facto and almost all hosts can support it without any extra work.

Dynamic content is just content that changes, for example a in a blog when you request a page the blog software on a server inserts the content that the blogger wrote into a template and sends it to your browser. Dynamic content doesn't actually need a server, you can have client-side dynamic content using Flash or JavaScript.

Here are some links for HTML(5), CSS and JS:

Mozilla Dev Network Javascript guide - You should take a look at the rest of the site too as well as their docs home page.
w3fools.com/ - Why you shouldn't use W3 schools.
Dive into HTML5
html5rocks.com
Codecademy - Interactive tutorials for HTM,L CSS, JS, PHP, jQuery, etc.
Digital Web Magazine - The Principles of Design - Basic design principles.
HTML5 Boilerplate - Good starting point, source code make a good reference for things like the head tag.
Quackit - Another Good reference for HTML and CSS.
Sitepoint - Another reference.
Stackoverflow - If you have ever looked up some kind if error or problem you probably have come across this one.
Don't forget Google either!

 

[ptogrph17]

Another thing that I'm really into for web design is responsive design. A responsive website restructures itself based on the browser size. This is becoming more and more important because more and more people are using mobile devices to surf the web, and as a result the range of screen sizes you can expect your visitors to be using is getting larger and larger. There a ton a grid systems out there that automate the process somewhat. On my website I used Zurb Foundation as a framework for my site which includes a grid system, another one that looks interesting to me is the golden grid system which is "folding grid" so it has a different number of columns depending on the screen size vs some other grids that just turn off the grid at a certain point. The grid in Foundation gives a little more control the golden grid I think, It let you define two grids one for small screens and one for large ones. The magic behind these responsive grids is CSS media queries, which let define different rules for different types of media, e.g., small, large, screen, print, "retina".

 

[epath13]

Another thing that I'm really into for web design is responsive design. A responsive website restructures itself based on the browser size. This is becoming more and more important because more and more people are using mobile devices to surf the web, and as a result the range of screen sizes you can expect your visitors to be using is getting larger and larger. There a ton a grid systems out there that automate the process somewhat. On my website I used Zurb Foundation as a framework for my site which includes a grid system, another one that looks interesting to me is the golden grid system which is "folding grid" so it has a different number of columns depending on the screen size vs some other grids that just turn off the grid at a certain point. The grid in Foundation gives a little more control the golden grid I think, It let you define two grids one for small screens and one for large ones. The magic behind these responsive grids is CSS media queries, which let define different rules for different types of media, e.g., small, large, screen, print, "retina".

Yeah... I know... Unfortunately I will have to worry about it later, at this point it's much more important for me just to get my websites out there, and then later I might completely reconsider how they are going to look. I will probably make separate mobile versions as well. At this point I need to have a system, content, updates schedule, etc etc etc I have enough work for a company btw, what language your website is in? I was looking at it in safari so the language wasn't detected. Just curious, I didn't recognize it

 

[ptogrph17]

Are you making a static website? If you want it to have more of a system you could some kind of CMS(content management system), I've used GetSimpleCMS before and it's a pretty quick way to quickly get into making a dynamic website with a steep learning curve, I'd say it's about 6X easier to develop for then Wordpress. What to do is you have at least one file called template.php (you don't need to know PHP) with your HTML code and add a special tag where you want it to insert the content. That's the bare minimum it's better to have the header and footer in separate files and use tags to include them into your template file(s), the advantage to that is that you can have different page templates with different layouts all sharing the same header and footer -- for example on my website(I use a different CMS but the concept is the same) I have the header and footer in their own files along with a home page template, a page template and templates for my gallery pages, when I want to change the html in the header or footer I only have to change one file instead of going though four or five copying and pasting. Another thing I liked about GetSimple is that you don't have to deal with setting up a database for it, it just saves it configuration in files.

You could install XAMPP, which is like a mini server on your computer that lets you work on thing's like Wordpress or GetSimple template on you computer locally without needing to constantly upload things onto a real server. An easy way to do it is to work on the template with some placeholder content, and then when you're done with the template you can upload to another installation of GetSimple on your server, then add the content. I tried to setup a GetSimple website with all of the content setup, and then copy the whole thing it to the server, it worked eventually but it took longer than I thought it would, because even though I followed the guide for migrating GetSimple there was a plugin for nested menus that I installed that was messing it up because it cached the old URLs from when it was still on my computer (when you are using something like XAMPP the URL of the site is "localhost" and even after I uploaded the site the menu links still linked back to localhost instead of the domain name) and it wasn't very apparent what was going on at first (stay away from that plugin "nested menus", or something, i18n looks better). I'm not saying you shouldn't try to do something like that but in my experience CMSs don't like being moved very much and retaliate by wasting your time :banghead:.

Well.. about my website, it full of Lorem Ipsum (gibberish Latin placeholder content) so maybe that messed it up, I'm American so when I actually add content it will be English. At first when I saw Ipsum I also thought it was some obscure foreign language too.

BTW do you use a text editor or something like Dreamweaver.

I hope that helps

 

[epath13]

Are you making a static website? If you want it to have more of a system you could some kind of CMS(content management system), I've used GetSimpleCMS before and it's a pretty quick way to quickly get into making a dynamic website with a steep learning curve, I'd say it's about 6X easier to develop for then Wordpress. What to do is you have at least one file called template.php (you don't need to know PHP) with your HTML code and add a special tag where you want it to insert the content. That's the bare minimum it's better to have the header and footer in separate files and use tags to include them into your template file(s), the advantage to that is that you can have different page templates with different layouts all sharing the same header and footer -- for example on my website(I use a different CMS but the concept is the same) I have the header and footer in their own files along with a home page template, a page template and templates for my gallery pages, when I want to change the html in the header or footer I only have to change one file instead of going though four or five copying and pasting. Another thing I liked about GetSimple is that you don't have to deal with setting up a database for it, it just saves it configuration in files.

You could install XAMPP, which is like a mini server on your computer that lets you work on thing's like Wordpress or GetSimple template on you computer locally without needing to constantly upload things onto a real server. An easy way to do it is to work on the template with some placeholder content, and then when you're done with the template you can upload to another installation of GetSimple on your server, then add the content. I tried to setup a GetSimple website with all of the content setup, and then copy the whole thing it to the server, it worked eventually but it took longer than I thought it would, because even though I followed the guide for migrating GetSimple there was a plugin for nested menus that I installed that was messing it up because it cached the old URLs from when it was still on my computer (when you are using something like XAMPP the URL of the site is "localhost" and even after I uploaded the site the menu links still linked back to localhost instead of the domain name) and it wasn't very apparent what was going on at first (stay away from that plugin "nested menus", or something, i18n looks better). I'm not saying you shouldn't try to do something like that but in my experience CMSs don't like being moved very much and retaliate by wasting your time :banghead:.

Well.. about my website, it full of Lorem Ipsum (gibberish Latin placeholder content) so maybe that messed it up, I'm American so when I actually add content it will be English. At first when I saw Ipsum I also thought it was some obscure foreign language too.

BTW do you use a text editor or something like Dreamweaver.

I hope that helps

Well... how should I explain back in 90s (late 90s) I decided that I wanted to make a website so I started learning HTML. I remember I was reading this book, it was as easy as pie. Very soon I downloaded Dreamweaver and thought: "why should I learn any language when I can just put some tables here and there, and I'm done" so that's what I did. later I was trying to do something a little bit more complex, I was trying to build a database... (I started a dating service, had 3,5 clients... it was an interesting experience ) well that didn't really work as for mail form , long time ago I had this free website on a Russian server, so I just took their java code, placed it where needed and that's it. So I did everything in HTML, I didn't even try to explore PHP or anything else... I'm not even sure I have a clear understanding of how things actually work. I'm not saying it's hard, I just have never really had passion for programming... I found it interesting though But it would be nice to know, if I want to consider myself as a web designer I probably should know. It's like for me a website is a toast and Dreamweaver is a toaster, I put bread in it and a toast comes out I have never felt like I needed to know how the toaster works inside and out but, sometimes, when something goes wrong, it's better to know than not to know, but still... I might just make another toast or get another toaster.

I'll get one of my websites out with a proper domain in a day or 2, so you can see what I'm talking about....

now about PHP. I have a very static website, I will update it every now and then, when I have new stuff to show but it doesn't have to be updated depending on a user ... yet... so I don't really see point in PHP. PHP is like an action processing language, so if you have some if-s, it will process it and will create HTML output. Am I understanding it right?
as for server on the computer, Dreamweaver explained how to do it (Help function ), I did it... and it worked... I think but honestly, at this point, it's much easier for me just to upload it to the server where the website is going to be on.

are you a programmer? a student? and why did you decide to have this language there... I presume it is because you want to see how it looks with content but you don't have content yet... is this the case?

 

[kicker]

PHP is an object oriented language. It uses lumped together code to process common functions or custom functions. Say you have a form on your home page to log in and the same form on all your pages. Instead of writing out the form x number of times you would have one function that writes out the code multiple times by only adding one line in each of your pages. An example of a function is below:

function getFoo(): String{
var foo: String = "hello world";
return foo;
}

Now very basically if I want to display the value of foo all I have to do on any of my pages is write the following using object oriented programming:

getFoo();

That will always return "hello world". You wouldn't really use it for something that basic but it provides a good example of the use. If you are just planing on occasionally changing picture or text php isn't worth the effort. HTML is more than enough. If you had a heavy data driven site like this one you would need a object oriented language to do that.

 

[ptogrph17]

are you a programmer? a student? and why did you decide to have this language there... I presume it is because you want to see how it looks with content but you don't have content yet... is this the case?

I taught myself all I know about programming(HTML isn't programming per say, it's technically a markup language, i.e., it doesn't deal with structuring logic, but organizing content), and I have taken a few classes on web design that covered very basic concepts, but found that I learned much more on my own. One if them used Dreamweaver and focused on the basics of HTML and CSS, that was really the only time I used Dreamweaver, now it's just Notepad++ and Sublime text.

There's nothing wrong with using Dreamweaver but it would be a good idea to learn how html works (if you don't know that is) and to use the split code view in Dreamweaver. That way you can use it to help you design a web page and keep an eye on what it's doing, some people don't like visual HTML editors because sometimes they do weird things to the code.

What version of Dreamweaver do you use? Because the one I have uses CSS (HTML is the content and structure, while CSS is the presentation) a lot and I remember that even though it had a nice dialog for a lot of different properties it still lacked some basic things like min-height. Also you mentioned using tables, using tables for the layout is now considered bad practice by a lot of people, here's some people arguing about it. IMO Dreamweaver could be a lot more useful if you know how bypass it sometimes and edit the code directly.

I don't think there is anything wrong with working with a static site instead of a dynamic one, Like anything there are trade-offs either way.

 

[epath13]

HTML isn't programming per say, it's technically a markup language, i.e., it doesn't deal with structuring logic, but organizing content

makes sense
I use Dreamweaver CS5 11.0

Well, as for the tables, I find them easy to use and easy to "control" I've read what you've posted (linked to) about the tables and CSS and I've also found some other articles and arguments about this. Well.... I've already made an entire website, CSS seem to be pretty easy to use, I don't know why I haven't looked into it before... I guess because I'm so used to the tables... and because I can actually see what I'm doing and where I put stuff: it's right there all in dots and lines can you see the lines with CSS? maybe I'll publish it and then see if I can remake it with CSS... I'm going to try a few things and see if it makes any difference. Thanks for the advise btw

 

[epath13]

I'm back, if anyone is still interested in this thread
So, I've published one of my website NIKOXXII.com

Now I've read some documentation at CSS Tutorial about CSS and other things and decided, even though it's all easy and stuff but it requires practice. I intend to publish my second website the way I have published the 1st one. But I do understand, once information load increases I will have to come up with a structure that it is easier to manage. I do have to do some more learning and practicing in the meantime.... ::

 

[kicker]

Looks really well done so far. I didn't look at the HTML just the front end (visual part) but like I said looks well done so the HTML doesn't matter. One thing though if you want a user to be interested don't overload or under do a page with information. You came close to over doing it with all the different topics you have on your home page. I wouldn't add any more things to your home page unless its just a text link to other information. You stopped at the right amount, because everything relates easily to one another.

As your site grows you'll be tempted to show how big it is on your home page resist the urge. Keep it simple and just enough to peak interest. Then have links to the other stuff in your navigation bar.

But again very nice.

Also if you want to learn an easy server language for a more data driven site try coldfusion from adobe. You can easily install the server program on your home PC and test it out there. They offer a free developer version. Coldfusion is tag based like HTML so it's easier to remember functions for different things. Like say you want to set a variable and display it it would look like this:

<cfset foo="hello world"/>
<cfoutput>#foo#</cfoutput>

Since you already have HTML understood its easier than trying to retrain yourself for something else when starting out. A lot of people will disagree and every programming language has its pros and cons, but coldfusion is probably the least difficult to grasp starting out. And it can be a very powerful tool once you learn how to manipulate it.

 

[kicker]

Btw I won't get tired of this thread you're singing my song. Love talking about this stuff.

 

[ptogrph17]

Sorry for leaving for so long -- I was taking a break from the forum, then I went on a vacation out of the state for about a week.

But about Dreamweaver showing you the dots and lines (you mean the dotted borders it shows on the tables right?) a really, really, really helpful thing I use constantly when I'm doing web design work is to use a web inspector. Two that I know of that are good are Firebug(for Firefox) and Chrome web developer tool (comes with Google Chrome), I use Chrome mostly and am pretty comfortable with it's web dev tools. I'm just going to call these "web debuggers" for now on, so with a web debugger you can hover over elements on a page and it will highlight them, you can view all of the css rules that affect the selected element and edit them in you browser. I prefer doing that over Dreamweaver because I already, I don't really know how to use Dreamweaver beyond the basics, and I think I like the lightweight approach better.

I took a look at you website, I didn't look through the whole thing but I liked the theme or feel that it had. I liked reading about your drawing philosophy, it's really cool! It does seem a little rough because the header and footer color don't seem to go together, there were a few details that also seem a little rough -- but it's still fresh off the press. It look's like you're using a image map for the links of your homepage, I don't know if I have used one before. I really like the home page, I usually have a hard time thinking of what to do with it.

I'm quickly typing this and didn't reread it very thoroughly, so there might be typos or it might sound a little weird.

 

[epath13]

Sorry for leaving for so long -- I was taking a break from the forum, then I went on a vacation out of the state for about a week.

But about Dreamweaver showing you the dots and lines (you mean the dotted borders it shows on the tables right?) a really, really, really helpful thing I use constantly when I'm doing web design work is to use a web inspector. Two that I know of that are good are Firebug(for Firefox) and Chrome web developer tool (comes with Google Chrome), I use Chrome mostly and am pretty comfortable with it's web dev tools. I'm just going to call these "web debuggers" for now on, so with a web debugger you can hover over elements on a page and it will highlight them, you can view all of the css rules that affect the selected element and edit them in you browser. I prefer doing that over Dreamweaver because I already, I don't really know how to use Dreamweaver beyond the basics, and I think I like the lightweight approach better.

I took a look at you website, I didn't look through the whole thing but I liked the theme or feel that it had. I liked reading about your drawing philosophy, it's really cool! It does seem a little rough because the header and footer color don't seem to go together, there were a few details that also seem a little rough -- but it's still fresh off the press. It look's like you're using a image map for the links of your homepage, I don't know if I have used one before. I really like the home page, I usually have a hard time thinking of what to do with it.

I'm quickly typing this and didn't reread it very thoroughly, so there might be typos or it might sound a little weird.

Thanks well, at this point I'm going to concentrate on getting the second website out and keeping this one up and running. I'll see if I check the "debugger" you've mentioned tomorrow and see what it does. Now that I'm looking at it I want to change a lot of things, but I know I should prioritize. It's good enough for the beginning and when I know what my products are, when the second site is running etc etc, then I'll see if I want to redesign. But I will most likely have to make a few changes for easier updates later... And in the end, with this kind of things, it is always work in progress

 

[ptogrph17]

Here's a video I found showing the basics of Chrome's web inspector:

-----
btw if you're doing layout work for your other site drawing sketches or wireframes before working on the actual design helps a lot.

 

[ptogrph17]

ColdFusion is a bit expensive, there is Railo Server though, which basically is a free open source ColdFusion interpreter.