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Website coding
The core languages
HTML and CSS are wonderful, and every year they are updated and added to. CSS in particular can now select elements on a Web page, and get them to behave in ways that once only programming languages could.
And no one can be described as a website programmer who isn’t at home with these marvellous languages, especially in their 2026 incarnations.
However, at the end of the day HTML is a markup language that declares elements and defines website page structures. And CSS is about styling and visual effects. They are not programming languages.
Programming languages
Programming languages make decisions, which can be based on conditions. They use logic. They carry out instructions using if and while. They can locate and display data from databases. They can set the most complicated events in motion.
Such languages were developed and used on computers years before Timothy Berners-Lee invented the Web, in 1989. You may have heard of FORTRAN or COBOL or BASIC (among many others). The first Web languages arrived in the 1990s, some adapted from general languages, some created for the Web: Python, Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, Ruby … These languages interact with the new website data recording languages: MySQL and XML (see belowopposite).
Website programming
There are 2 dates on this page: 2026 and 1989. What is the difference between them? One was typed in directly; the other is programmed in. It is the year you are reading this, and programming can easily work that out.
This tiny example shows the power of programming. Of course programming can do much more. Entire website pages can be created from scratch, and appear instantly in your browser. Things can disappear from pages because it says in your programmed profile that you would rather not see them, or be added because your profile says that you are keen to see them. But the date example makes the essential point: with programmed elements, websites come alive.
Necessary extra ‘languages’
Website programming would be much more limited than it is if it had to do without the extensible markup language XML and the database management system MySQL, which uses the query language SQL.
Many websites—estate agents’ websites for example—use ‘XML feeds’ to pass on information to other websites. Details of properties for sale, for example.
These feeds work because they are ‘machine-readable’. The receiving computer can handle the feed without human supervision.
This is achieved by passing on the XML in a programmed script—programmed most commonly in PHP.
XML is also used—in this case directly—to code sitemaps for Google and other search engines.
MySQL is used to build databases. If you are interested in what MySQL can do for you, you can browse our page on database design.
Web Costa Blanca Programming
Your options
(The languages I myself work with are in bold above.)
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