Web Dev: Optimization, Server Processing, and JavaScript

Overview

To round out your web-development skills, you'll improve web content by adjusting layouts, performing basic search-engine optimization (SEO), and test your website for issues. You'll also submit data to a web server for processing through a URL and a web form. Then, you'll add JavaScript to a web page, perform operations on data, program repetitive tasks, and manipulate Document Object Model (DOM) objects. After that, you'll enumerate elements and attach events through code. Lastly, you'll use third-party JavaScript libraries and frameworks to streamline your code. This is the fourth and final course in a multi-course Specialization. All of the courses in this Specialization require that you run a XAMPP web server on localhost. The course setup instructions provided in the first course go into more detail about the hardware and software requirements.

Syllabus

Improving Web Content

As your site continues to take shape, you'll want to ensure that you're following strategies that will produce good results on a wide variety of devices for users with different accessibility needs, and that users will be able to quickly find your site on web search engines.

Submitting Data to a Web Server for Processing

Even if your job responsibility is only on the web front end (browser-side development in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), there may be times where your web pages must interact with a web application. For example, your web pages may need to include instructions to pull dynamic (server-generated) content into the web page. Links that you create may need to include queries for special content. Furthermore, you may need to create web forms that will send data to a server for processing or collection.

Writing JavaScript Code

JavaScript enables you to perform a wide variety of complex tasks directly in the web browser, which can make web pages more interactive and dynamic, and can help reduce the number of communications needed with the web server, making web applications faster and more responsive.

Enumerating and Processing Collections of Elements

Tasks like form validation involve working with multiple elements. JavaScript provides various techniques that enable you to conveniently iterate through a set of related elements, such as all the web forms in a page, or all the controls in a form.

Using Third-Party Libraries and Frameworks

Many web developers throughout the world have gone before you. They have solved problems as they worked in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and developed their own tools, templates, and reusable code to make their web development projects faster, more consistent, and less problematic. Though "the struggle" to solve problems and perfect your trade leads to knowledge and expertise, there's often little point in reinventing the wheel. This lesson introduces various open source web development templates, tools, and reusable code that you should investigate.