HTML and CSS are Internet technologies being developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (w3c.org).
HTML and CSS are the building blocks, the stuff of which web pages are made. They’re not programming languages, rocket science or some mysterious code that only geeks learn to do.
HTML and CSS are formatting and layout systems needed to create (markup) web pages. They are both rather straightforward and logical. That’s good news!!
HTML is…
used to make headings, paragraphs, data tables, lists, links, and text boxes – among other things – on web pages. It provides the essential ingredients for putting a page together, much like building a house that needs a roof, rooms, walls, and a basement. It provides structure to a web document. It’s more like grammar than anything else as it’s purpose is to organize content so that it has meaning.
Sometimes people refer to it as Tags. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language.
See how HTML works with the Code Tester, a tool used in the class, Intro To HTML.
What’s It Look Like?
Say you’d like to have a paragraph on a page. Here it is:
<p>When I have a few sentences to group together I use
a p tag. It has an open tag- <p>- which starts the paragraph and a
close tag- </p> -
which closes the paragraph.</p>
For every open tag there’s always a close tag. That’s what makes using HTML fairly easy to work with and master.
CSS stands for…
Cascading Style Sheets. It’s the way we bring color, typography, and layout to a web page. It works alongside XHTML. If we were building a house, CSS would be the house color, window treatments, floor coverings, and furniture placement.
It provides the decoration, the sizzle of a site.
Put ‘em both together and you’ve got your formula to do something useful on the web and make some magic at the same time.
If you know HTML you can skip this class and take my Practical CSS class.
What’s It Look Like
Say you’d like to define the background color of, font color and type face for all the pages of your web site. Here is what that looks like:
body
{background:#fff;
color:#000;
font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}
Here the pages would have a white background, black font and use the arial typeface.
