Through this workshop, you have learned the basics of two of the most commonly-used languages for building on the web: HTML and CSS.
HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, organizes content on your page using elements denoted by tags (< >
). When being rendered by your browser, these tags tell your browser that certain content is paragraph text, while other content is heading or title text, and so on. You also use image (<img>
) and link or anchor (<a>
) tags to tell the browser to render an image on the page, or take the visitor to another page on your or another website. We also discussed some important conventions to consider when creating HTML documents, such as nesting.
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, allows for further styling of your website through the application of a series of rule sets that are applied to different aspects/elements of your site. In order for CSS to render on a webpage, it must be integrated with your html, which can happen in 3 ways: inline, internal, and external. CSS rules can be of varying specificity, and in particular, through creating classes and ids. We also discussed how the ordering of rule sets doesn't matter, because an important function of CSS is the way it filters and applies rules in accordance with the specificity of the rule.
Through understanding these languages in combination with one another, you can also reframe your understanding of the web - not as poof! magic!, but as a series of intentionally styled, hyperlinked text documents, with each website representing folder of documents.
While this is a good starting point, one important question remains: how can I get these text documents on the Internet so they can be accessed, and interacted with, and linked to by others?