Strategic Internet Marketing & Management, LLC.

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

From W3C

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. W3C is a forum for information, commerce, communication, and collective understanding.

Why should I validate my HTML pages?

One of the important maxims of computer programming is: Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept.

Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if they're not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

Cross-browser Cascading Style Sheets

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is the HTML method for controlling visual presentation on web pages. It is a simple styling language which allows attaching style to HTML elements. Every element type as well as every occurrence of a specific element within that type can be declared a unique style, e.g. margins, positioning, color or size.

PHP Development

PHP is a widely-used open source scripting technology that is significantly suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML pages. This technology allows us to create interactive sites to a database, create security, and provide variable data to your pages.

PHP is not like programming in Perl or C. It gives you the ability to write an HTML script with some embedded code to output values (like text, numbers, etc.), unlike Perl or C that requires writing a program with lots of commands to output HTML. This means pages load faster.

The main use of PHP is Server Side scripting. Unlike client side JavaScripts, PHP is executed on the Server. If we created a script to output information on your page, the client would see the results but have no way to determine the underlying code. This allows us to secure the data that is allowed to be viewed and what needs to be private.

Command line scripting: we can make a PHP script run without any server or browser. We only need the PHP parser to use it this way. This type of usage is ideal for scripts regularly executed using cron (on *nix or Linux) or Task Scheduler (on Windows). These scripts can also be used for simple text processing tasks, and database optmizations.

MySQL (database)

From MySQL

1. Scalability and Flexibility
The MySQL database server provides the ultimate in scalability, sporting the capacity to handle deeply embedded applications with a footprint of only 1MB to running massive data warehouses holding terabytes of information. Platform flexibility is a stalwart feature of MySQL with all flavors of Linux, UNIX, and Windows being supported. And, of course, the open source nature of MySQL allows complete customization for those wanting to add unique requirements to the database server.

2. High Performance
A unique storage-engine architecture allows database professionals to configure the MySQL database server specifically for particular applications, with the end result being amazing performance results. Whether the intended application is a high-speed transactional processing system or a high-volume web site that services a billion queries a day, MySQL can meet the most demanding performance expectations of any system. With high-speed load utilities, distinctive memory caches, full text indexes, and other performance-enhancing mechanisms, MySQL offers all the right ammunition for today's critical business systems.

3. High Availability
Rock-solid reliability and constant availability are hallmarks of MySQL, with customers relying on MySQL to guarantee around-the-clock uptime. MySQL offers a variety of high-availability options from high-speed master/slave replication configurations, to specialized Cluster servers offering instant failover, to third party vendors offering unique high-availability solutions for the MySQL database server.

4. Robust Transactional Support
MySQL offers one of the most powerful transactional database engines on the market. Features include complete ACID (atomic, consistent, isolated, durable) transaction support, unlimited row-level locking, distributed transaction capability, and multi-version transaction support where readers never block writers and vice-versa. Full data integrity is also assured through server-enforced referential integrity, specialized transaction isolation levels, and instant deadlock detection.

5. Web and Data Warehouse Strengths
MySQL is the de-facto standard for high-traffic web sites because of its high-performance query engine, tremendously fast data insert capability, and strong support for specialized web functions like fast full text searches. These same strengths also apply to data warehousing environments where MySQL scales up into the terabyte range for either single servers or scale-out architectures. Other features like main memory tables, B-tree and hash indexes, and compressed archive tables that reduce storage requirements by up to eighty-percent make MySQL a strong standout for both web and business intelligence applications.

6. Strong Data Protection
Because guarding the data assets of corporations is the number one job of database professionals, MySQL offers exceptional security features that ensure absolute data protection. In terms of database authentication, MySQL provides powerful mechanisms for ensuring only authorized users have entry to the database server, with the ability to block users down to the client machine level being possible. SSH and SSL support are also provided to ensure safe and secure connections. A granular object privilege framework is present so that users only see the data they should, and powerful data encryption and decryption functions ensure that sensitive data is protected from unauthorized viewing. Finally, backup and recovery utilities provided through MySQL and third party software vendors allow for complete logical and physical backup as well as full and point-in-time recovery.

7. Comprehensive Application Development
One of the reasons MySQL is the world's most popular open source database is that it provides comprehensive support for every application development need. Within the database, support can be found for stored procedures, triggers, functions, views, cursors, ANSI-standard SQL, and more. For embedded applications, plug-in libraries are available to embed MySQL database support into nearly any application. MySQL also provides connectors and drivers (ODBC, JDBC, etc.) that allow all forms of applications to make use of MySQL as a preferred data management server. It doesn't matter if it's PHP, Perl, Java, Visual Basic, or .NET, MySQL offers application developers everything they need to be successful in building database-driven information systems.