Developer's Section

As you might know my name is Peter Troon. I have a degree in computer science and nowadays I am a programmer or a developer. Developer is a broad name, because I can develop Web applications and other applications. If you want to know more about my skills, you can read the information on my resume.

The content of this site will vary from general information with links to other sites to tips and tricks and self created products. In this time it is very important to have many skills, so that you as a developer can be assigned to multifunctional tasks. There are many developers who have more than one skill and that makes them more interesting for companies.

Another reason why it is very necessary to be a specialist in more areas is that nowadays almost anything is created using more than one technique. Even simple homepages use at least HTML, JavaScript and nowadays also Cascading Style Sheets. More advanced homepages are generated using a scripting language such as ColdFusion, Active Server Pages and PHP.

It may be clear that the task for a Web Developer is a harsh one. A homepage may appear very simple to the visitor, but many times it is much more complexer than it appears. A homepage has several parts, which have to fit together to make one whole. It is not an easy task to have these parts match.

Many persons say that HTML is very easy to learn. That may be true, because indeed it is not that complex. It is very easy to understand HTML and create a homepage manually. But that is only partially true, becuase it is easy to write HTML, but it is much harder to write syntactically correct HTML.

Many persons never discover that their HTML is incorrect, because the most popular browsers (Microsoft Internet Explorer, Netscape and Opera) correct many of these errors and still render the page correctly. Or if a particular error occurs in the HTML the browser is intelligent enough to make an assumption of what is meant and in most cases the assumption is correct and the result still something the author is satisfied with. The most authors don't care anymore about the HTML if the page looks right to them in their browser.

If a page is displayed correctly in one browser, it is not guaranteed that the page will be rendered correctly in all browsers. The problem is that HTML on itself is very limited and that it nowadays is used for purposes it never was meant for. With many tricks it is possible to achieve very impressive results. Many browsers have added additional functionality to HTML. So certain tags are only understood by certain browsers. One of the beautiful features the internet browsers is, that they ignore tags they don't understand. So a browser should not crash or act strange when a page is accessed with HTML tags that browser doesn't understand. Therefore it is very easy for the manufacterer of a browser to add tags, which are not HTML standard or even only understood by that browser.

The issues mentioned above and many more things make the profession of a Web Developer harder than it looks from the outside and thus more interesting.

Peter Troon Site

Because the Peter Troon site consists of several parts containing information about different subject, it might be interesting to look around to read about other stuff. The list below provides some - but definately not all - links to other parts of this site. Feel free to use at least one of these links...

To contact the author of these pages, send an electronic mail to: pajtroon@dds.nl.
Peter's ICQ Number is: #3900785.

This page: Copyright © 2002 Peter A. J. Troon

Note: This page is part of the Peter Troon Site.