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is so important it becomes part of their name. For instance, as you might guess, Server Side Includes (SSI) is a server-side technology. Mostly, though, the names of web technologies give very little away. For instance, would you guess, from its name alone, that PHP (originally called Personal Home Page tools) is a server-side technology? Probably not.

Some versatile technologies work both sides of the street. Java, for instance, is frequently used on the client side, as a downloadable applet. But it also performs many server-side jobs. You’ll hear developers and systems administrators talk about Java servlets, which are miniature Java applications that run the Apache server’s mod_jserv component. Or you might host a site on Jigsaw, a W3C server that’s written entirely in the Java language.

You don’t really have to know any of this, as long as you get the general idea. Now let’s move on to some specifics.

Server-Side Stuff

The days of slicing Photoshop comps and hand-coding every last HTML page are not dead—they just smell bad.

One day soon, web designers will be fully liberated from these crude production methods. It will happen when a core group of web standards is completely supported in browsers, enabling us to separate style from content, presentation from structure, and design from data. It hasn’t happened yet, as any working web designer can tell you. It’s coming soon, we tell you now. We’ll talk more about it in Chapter 13, “Never Can Say Goodbye,” so save your questions until then.

Meanwhile, we have interim solutions that let us create web pages without, well, creating web pages. Under the principles of dynamic site construction, we can establish the conditions for web pages instead of building each page individually.

The process is simple: To begin with, web designers create visual templates, while writers, editors, and marketers create content. (Hopefully the two teams are talking to each other so that design and content work together.) The content is stored and indexed in vast, humming “back-end” databases,

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and the site is launched. When visitors request data, server-side middleware applications fetch the appropriate content and pour it into the designer’s template. The result: virtual pages that can be read, used, and bookmarked but that do not exist as conventional, self-contained HTML documents. Oh, oh, oh, it’s magic. Let’s descend to earth and see how it works.

Where were you in ‘82?

Ever used a search engine such as Google (www.google.com)? You type in the name of your former high school sweetheart and hit the Google Search button. Moments later, you’re presented with page after page of links.

From these pages you learn that your old flame is the two-term governor of a large Midwestern state, honorary dean of a prestigious university, has had two charities, a hospital wing, and a Ben & Jerry’s flavor named after her, and relaxes by participating in amateur kick-boxing tournaments.

The question, of course, is why did you ever break up with her? But for our purposes, the question is, where do these Google results pages come from?

The Google results pages are created on the fly by software that sucks query-related entries from a huge database, determines which links are probably most relevant, and pours the results into a preexisting HTML template.

Who made the software? Programmers. How does data get into the database? More software: specifically, a search engine spider, so named because it crawls around the Web indexing the content and location of individual web pages. Where does the designer fit in? The designer creates the template that the software uses to display the results. How does the designer do that? Let’s see.

Indiana Jones and the template of doom

As a web designer, you might be called upon to design the front end of an application like Google, or you might work on vast content sites that rely on similarly dynamic processing. Or you could design a site that sells things, revealing new products in response to the visitor’s desires.

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Paradoxically, your job will not change that much from what we’ve described earlier in this book. You are still creating the part of the site that the visitor sees. You design it as you would any other web project. In a way, it’s like designing a magazine’s table of contents page. You create the master design; someone else designs the individual issues. It’s also like designing corporate letterhead in that your responsibility ends when you deliver the approved letterhead design. You don’t have to sit and type individual business letters. Creating website templates is as normal as those more familiar design processes. It’s after the image pieces and HTML templates leave your desk that the voodoo kicks in.

Precisely what happens next is up to your team’s developers—those who write the scripts that make these dynamic transactions possible. The developers take their lead from information architects, whose job is to figure out

“user flow” through the transactional portions of the site. (Who will come here? What will they want to do? How can we best fulfill their needs? What can go wrong?) The very things we advised you to do when planning an entire site, information architects do as they envision and structure the site’s transactions.

The data can be stored in an open source MySQL database, or in similar programs from Microsoft, Oracle, and other companies. As each visitor hits the site and begins to take actions, the middleware that lies between the visitor and the back-end database begins to do its thing.

It is the job of the middleware to process each request, fetch the appropriate document (or document fragment), and pour it into your template. Common middleware applications include open source PHP, Allaire Cold Fusion, and Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP). MySQL is often found on UNIX Apache servers, Microsoft SQL and ASP on Microsoft Windows NT servers, and PHP can run on UNIX Apache or Windows/IIS.

Deciding on the appropriate database and middleware is not your concern. Technology officers and network administrators solve that problem. You aren’t expected to write code that complies with these middleware programs’ requirements either; developers do that, and we love them for it. You can learn to write code for PHP, ASP, or Cold Fusion if you wish, and we’ll have something to say about that in the “Doing More,” section that follows.

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Ordinarily, the developers and project managers will provide you with guidelines in a document that might be called the functional spec. They will also discuss requirements with you in one or more personal meetings— probably more. “We can’t have frames,” they might tell you or, “we must have frames,” could be their direction. Don’t skip these meetings and don’t rush to argue. Talk, listen, and learn.

The work process is but a variation on what you already do. You might take the comp no further than Photoshop; the developers will try to emulate it in, say, Cold Fusion, and show you the result. You might ask them to revise their code to bring the design up to your spec; they might ask you to revisit the design to accommodate limitations in the software or particular site requirements.

You will also write the Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) that determines colors, type sizes, margins, leading, and so on—same as always. You might find that some of these middleware technologies are unfortunately ill-suited to CSS, and you might need to do some HTML table work or have it done by your friendly neighborhood web technician.

It is sad but not surprising that some of these dynamic tools (Cold Fusion and the like) are more suited to old-style methods of web construction (<FONT> tags, table-based layouts, and so on) than to the newer, stan- dards-based methods (structural markup, design via CSS). After all, these server-side tools arose in a market driven by browser quirks and proprietary technologies, not by universally supported web standards. As browsers improve their support for web standards and as web designers and developers begin using these standards instead of whining about them or pleading ignorance, the dynamic tools will likely improve in this regard.

Serving the project

As you might expect, database-driven sites, built with templates, are usually not the place to show off your deep Photoshop layering skills, your ability to bring complex layouts to life via frames, or your newly acquired mastery of DHTML. Low bandwidth, large areas of flat, web-safe color, reasonably sized web fonts: This is the terrain you must plow; these are the

fields you must harvest.