Web Development and Reverse Engineering

Posted by admin | Uncategorized | Wednesday 10 March 2010 6:15 am

Web developers are always trying to create attractive and functional websites. If you are using a content management system you need no special knowledge of web technologies to create basic pages. But sooner or later you need to modify layout or some part of the website for which there are no settings in the user interface. Modifying code means knowing basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScipt, PHP and some other necessary languages used for websites. If you are new to this world you may need some tutorials and introductory texts to learn basics of web technologies.

However, there is another way of learning with possibility to experiment and test various modifications of the code or layout. It is called reverse engineering and means examining code of an existing web page. Every web browser has a function to display the source code of displayed web page. By examining it you can see what elements are needed to construct the web page. This is a great way to learn HTML and CSS language. Of course, examining and understanding how it works is one thing, creating your own project is another. The easiest way to start writing code is to make small modifications on your website. For this purpose you need a development installation on your home server, just because experimenting with a live website is not a good idea. Reling on the system used for your website you will have to find files which contain the code for the page under examination. There is no general rule, but the main core of the page layout is probably in some template file. Word Template Design is very useful.

This approach of examining the source code is also useful when you find a page with some fancy design or cool menu. To understand how it is done you need to find appropriate part of the code. Firefox, for example, has a nice feature to display only the source code of a small part of the website. You simply select the page elements you are fond of, click the right mouse button to display a menu and select View Selection Source. Once you have found source lines responsible for the wanted page element, you are able to study them and try to implement something similar on your website. This doesn’t mean that you are able to copy the code directly, you will have to modify it to be compatible with your existing website. But the basic principle is that you examine existing code and experiment with small modifications. If you combine this approach with web resources explaining theoretical background of web technologies, you may be able to quickly understand and learn new languages and technologies.If you want to know something about Word Template Design and Dictation Service Brisbane ,click on the links in this article.

 Mail this post
Share and Enjoy:
  • Digg
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • NewsVine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • YahooMyWeb
  • Google
  • Yahoo! Buzz
  • TwitThis
  • Live
  • LinkedIn
  • Pownce
  • MySpace
StumbleUpon It!

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Security Code: