HTML and CSS: An Overview
Every webpage on the internet needs a layout to keep all its contents organized and orderly. This organization is achieved with the use of HTML, HyperText Markup Language. In its purest form, HTML gives the contents of a webpage some structure.
HTML has a few rules, as it were, governing the structuring of your webpage. First, your content has to be enclosed within various elements to appear or behave in specific ways. For example, take the following sentence: Dogs are cool. If you want that line to stand alone, you could specify it to be a paragraph with the paragraph tag: <p>Dogs are cool.</p> Now, the content(‘Dogs are cool.’) is wrapped in a paragraph and will appear to stand alone if viewed as a webpage.
There are so many other tags you can use to structure your content, including headings(<h1> to <h6>), titles, <body> for defining the central part of your webpage, and <img> for adding images.
HTML, on its own, however, is very barebones and bland. Kind of like toast without butter, jam, peanut butter, or jelly(you get the point). It is edible, yes, but not very tasty. This is where Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, comes in (No, not on your toast). CSS gives your dull but functional webpage a much-needed facelift.
Can you tell that both of the above pictures are from the same webpage? The difference is that, of course, the second picture has CSS applied to the page. CSS opens up a whole new world for personalizing and making your web page stand out. You can add animations, rearrange your buttons and images, create borders and generally beautify your webpage or website.
So, there you have it. HTML and CSS, the crash course. This article is not a tutorial of any sort, but I am putting out what I have learned so far from AltSchool Africa’s School of Engineering programme. It has been amazing so far and I will put out another post on my experience.
Cheers!
