In a world of acronyms, it's important to choose your tools carefully.

There are literally hundreds of technologies that are capable of interacting with you as you browse across the web. They all have their strengths and weaknesses much of which you as a browser will only be aware of as minor moments of joy (oh! that was easy), or major points of frustration (but WHY can't I do that?). But these peaks and troughs add to the users experience of a web site, and when it's your web site suddenly the choice of technology matters.

Here are some of the main technologies we use at Appropriate Solutions and why.

XHTML 1.0, the work horse of the web.

The structure of our web sites is written using XHTML 1.0, this is the first fully mature incarnation of the next generation of web site languages. Designed to be more structured and less sloppy than previous html versions it promises better standardisation between web sites and browsers.

CSS, separating content from design.

Cascading Style Sheets has had it's teething troubles with sites looking quite different depending on which browser or operating system you were using, these were not the fault of CSS, rather the browsers that poorly implemented it. However with modern browsers such as Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox 3 and Opera 10, together with Safari and others mostly getting it right, there is no excuse to not use CSS any more. By separating the design elements from the structure (XHTML) CSS allows designs to be easily updated without  having to pull the actual content and structure of a web site apart.

PHP 5.x, the cogs and gears behind a million web sites.

PHP is a  server side scripting language, meaning it does the work to build, calculate, fetch and carry all the content that is then viewed on a website. We like PHP because it is Open Source (meaning it is not tied to one company or institution), mature (version 1 came out in 1994 and the current version is 5), has a wealth of support available and is very secure. It is used extensively throughout the Internet with many web sites running on what are called LAMP servers (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

XML, the lingua franca of the web.

Make no bones about it, XML is the future of the web. XML defines the structure of the information it holds, this allows the information to move easily between computers as it carries the instructions about how to use the information with it. It's like sending out a box of lego with the instructions on what to build attached. Because of this many computers use XML to talk to each other, and many of the web 'applications' (such as Google Maps) that are becoming important on the modern web use XML as their data language

MySQL, the universal database.

MySQL is an Open Source database that provides the information handling for millions of web sites across the globe. Very mature, very stable and very secure it underlies our all our Content Management Systems and e-commerce platforms.

DOM, the nicer face of javascript.

For a long time Javascript was a dirty word, as it gained a reputation for reducing accessibility in return for what was in effect just 'bling'. But now javascript has been reprieved through it's use with the Document Object Model. This allows users with extensive browsing facilities (latest browser, javascript turned on) to see a premium version of the page while those with limited browsing facilities (non-visual browser, no javascript) to still access a version of the page suitable for them. Kind of win-win in the design versus usability conflict.