Lesson 0: Why HTML

HTML is a commonly used language for developing web interfaces. It’s the markup language of the web. If you want to make a website, you have to learn HTML because that’s the language that browsers understand.

HTML is used to structure the layout of a webpage. Elements like the header, navigation bar, and text are placed inside HTML tags, which then compose a web page. Everything in HTML is represented by tags, which look like this <tag_name></tag_name> . A HTML tag consists of two components: an opening tag and a closing tag. In our previous example, <tag_name> is the opening tag, and </tag_name> is the closing tag. As you can tell, the closing tag is distinguished by having a “/” to the right of the “<” character.

In between the opening tag and the closing tag, you can include text or other HTML tags. One important rule to note is that: each opening tag must be accompanied by a closing tag.

You can’t create your own HTML tags. However, HTML already provides you the the tags you need to build any type of webpage. Different tags serve different purposes, and we’ll learn about some of them later in the course.

While it is true that you only need HTML to build a website, using only HTML will make your site look plain and unappealing. That’s why we’ll also learn about CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which we will use to style our sites to make them look prettier. CSS is used to style a webpage by changing element colors and applying different design properties of certain HTML tags/elements (like text fonts, colors, etc.). By the end of the course, you will have developed the necessary skills to go from a blank page to having a very neat looking website made with HTML and CSS. You will also have the foundational skills needed to become proficient in HTML and CSS.