Lesson 1 – What are HTML & CSS?
Posted by cssbytes on May 16, 2007
HTML
Probably everyday you go and look at one website on the internet, at least one, as long as you have access to a computer. Ever wondered how you get to see what you see on those pages? Here is the short answer: HTML, or Hyper Text Mark-Up Language. Here is the long answer: HTML is a form of computer language, that your internet browser will read, and display to you. For instance, this whole page is made-up of HTML coding. Most normal websites have an awful lot of HTML coding to show you what you see. It is almost unfathomable, to people new at HTML, or those experienced with it. Don’t believe me? Go on: View > Source on the top bar of your computer. Now you can see all of the coding.
CSS
Once you know the basics of HTML, you notice that usually the text you write is fairly boring to look at, and the tables you create might be too simple for you, with just white boxes and black lines. If you wanted to make all of this more interesting, by using HTML, then it can often take a large amount of coding, that is hard (and dangerous) to edit. This is where CSS comes in. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. The idea of CSS is to specify what your tables, text and many most of your page looks like, by telling the web browser what it is supposed to look like before it sees all of your text. This way you can easily jazz up all of your pages easily!
And that’s it for your first lesson and CSS & HTML. Hope this helps you a bit, on your journey through the wonders of it. Good luck, but do not worry – I will be here to guide you through it.
ajcann said
It would be nice if we could see some of the code – how about including some screenshots in your posts?
cssbytes said
Yeah, actually I had this really great idea for displaying some of the coding, but I can’t alter the WordPress CSS without paying $0.04 a day, so I’ll just have to write by hand every time. Still, I’m actually writing the next post right now.