The Basics

Getting to know web design

Web design is an amazing medium for self-expression, but its sheer complexity makes it challenging for many beginners and intermediate artist. You need to understand a lot of things to be able to do web design well.

HTML Example

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>

<h1>My First Heading</h1>

<p>My first paragraph.</p>

</body>
</html>

Example Explained

The DOCTYPE declaration defines the document type
The text between <html> and </html> describes the web page
The text between <body> and </body> is the visible page content
The text between <h1> and </h1> is displayed as a heading
The text between <p> and </p> is displayed as a paragraph

What is HTML?

HTML is a language for describing web pages.

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language
HTML is a markup language
A markup language is a set of markup tags
The tags describe document content
HTML documents contain HTML tags and plain text
HTML documents are also called web pages

HTML Tags

HTML markup tags are usually called HTML tags

HTML tags are keywords (tag names) surrounded by angle brackets like <html>
HTML tags normally come in pairs like <b> and </b>
The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag
The end tag is written like the start tag, with a forward slash before the tag name
Start and end tags are also called opening tags and closing tags

What is CSS?

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets
Styles define how to display HTML elements
Styles were added to HTML 4.0 to solve a problem
External Style Sheets can save a lot of work
External Style Sheets are stored in CSS files

CSS Demo

An HTML document can be displayed with different styles: See how it works

Styles Solved a Big Problem

HTML was never intended to contain tags for formatting a document.

HTML was intended to define the content of a document, like:

<h1>This is a heading</h1>

<p>This is a paragraph.</p>

When tags like <font>, and color attributes were added to the HTML 3.2 specification, it started a nightmare for web developers. Development of large web sites, where fonts and color information were added to every single page, became a long and expensive process.

To solve this problem, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) created CSS.

In HTML 4.0, all formatting could be removed from the HTML document, and stored in a separate CSS file.

All browsers support CSS today.

CSS Saves a Lot of Work!

CSS defines HOW HTML elements are to be displayed.

Styles are normally saved in external .css files. External style sheets enable you to change the appearance and layout of all the pages in a Web site, just by editing one single file!

CSS Syntax


p {font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif:
font-size: 1em;
}

JavaScript is the world's most popular programming language. It is the language for HTML and the web, for servers, PCs, laptops, tablets, smart phones, and more.

JavaScript is a Scripting Language

A scripting language is a lightweight programming language.

JavaScript is programming code that can be inserted into HTML pages.

JavaScript inserted into HTML pages, can be executed by all modern web browsers.

JavaScript is easy to learn.