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The purpose of these pages is to point out some of the technologies that are part of the World Wide Web as it exists today. It is important to be aware of them as decisions are made in deploying a website. It is not that there are necessarily right or wrong answers, but that there are choices. Those choices, by definition, exclude other things. As you move through a design and development process, early choices can be difficult to change as more layers of development are added. It is important to understand the ramifications of those choices as they are made, not when the change is costly.
I had a client many years ago who told me the reason he engaged me for a project was that he was happily paying me for the mistakes I had already made, and would not make on his project. It is experience.
It is important know the rules of any discipline. I would define an expert as someone who knows "when and how to break the rules." To succeed in any discipline you must know and understand the rules first. You must understand the inter-relationship of the rules and how they affect each other. Then you know how to bend or break a rule to satisfy a need without causing a problem. Breaking the rules is easy, especially if you don't understand them. Breaking the rules without breaking the project is another thing altogether.
This thing of building web pages and websites brings together a lot of different rule sets from numerous disciplines and technologies, some of which can be in conflict with each other. Knowing how to assemble all of these blocks into a successful website that will perform, as expected daily is not a simple task.
Some of these competing technologies and disciplines are briefly covered below. This is not a complete list, but covers most of the major ones. Many books have been written on each of these.
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