Web Development Basics: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for Beginners
Web development involves terms like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The Web is built with these components.
In web development, these tools are dominant. Every library or tool seems to revolve around HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As a result, if you plan on becoming a web developer, you need to learn them well. Moreover, these three languages are used most often to build websites.
What each of them is and what they’re used for? How are these languages so important? Why are they so prevalent in web development tutorials and topics?
We’ll explain in detail: What HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are, how they work, and what they can do for you.
Basics
A computer’s IP address can be used to identify and locate it on the internet. IP Address looks like this: 168.212.226.204
Websites are subsets of the Internet.
Likewise, every computer network has two main components: a client and a server.
Clients request data, and servers share or serve it. In order to accomplish this, both parties must agree. That agreement is named API (Application Programming Interface).
This data needs to be arranged and formatted into a form that’s understandable by end-users with a wide range of technical experience and abilities.
Here comes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the concept of web development.
Text in HTML
HTML means Hyper Text Markup Language.
An instruction for typesetting a manuscript, usually written on the manuscript itself, concerning the typeface, page layout, and so on.
What HTML is used for? HTML creates detailed instructions regarding style, type, format, structure, and the layout of a web page before it gets rendered (shown to you).
It allows you to divide your page into elements such as paragraphs, sections, headings, navigation bars, etc.
A document can be formatted and structured using only HTML. Some web elements include:
- Level 1 heading h1
- Level 2 heading h2
- Level 3 heading h3
- A paragraph p
- An unordered list with bullet points ul li
- A button input input
- And the whole body of the page
These elements can also have attributes that can be used to identify and access them from other parts of the site. For all three-span elements, we can set the id attribute. Our JavaScript will be able to access these files as we will see later.
This attribute is similar to your social media username. Other people can find you on social media by using this name. This name can also be used to refer to you (you can be tagged in a post, etc.).
You will need to style anything other than a demo to make it more presentable. This can be done with CSS.
CSS
CSS is a design language that you use to make your web page look nice and presentable. HTML is a markup language used for the structure and formatting of a web page.
What CSS means? Cascading Style Sheets. You can use it to make a website look better. With CSS styles, you can improve your page’s appearance and ease of use for the end-user.
Imagine a world in which human beings were just skeletal remains. What would it look like? Not so nice. So CSS resembles our physical appearance.
CSS can be used to position elements on your page.
You must “select” these elements to access them. Single or multiple web elements can be selected and positioned or styled as you wish.
CSS selectors govern this process.
CSS allows you to set colour, background, font, margin, spacing, padding and many more attributes for your elements.
How does CSS work?
By applying a style, our website will look different.
Selecting an element gives us access to it. Level 1 headings in the page are selected by the h1 element, level 2 elements are selected by the h2, etc. The HTML elements you select can be positioned or displayed in any way you want.
JavaScript
What Javascript does? The markup language is HTML, CSS is the design language, so JavaScript is the programming language.
If you’re not familiar with programming, consider the following: You eat when you are hungry. You sleep when you are tired. You seek warmth when you are cold.
Every time something happens, your brain is programmed to react in a certain way or respond in a certain way. The same applies to programming your web page or individual elements to react in a certain way and to respond to an event that occurs.
In addition to actions and conditions, you can program calculations, network requests, and concurrency instructions.
Any element can be accessed using the Document Object Model API (DOM) and changed however you want.
In the browser, the DOM represents a web page in the form of a tree.
The DOM represents each element on a web page
Our web page can be accessed using methods thanks to the DOM.
A website can be made to “think and act” using JavaScript, which is what programming is all about.
In an example HTML page, we were going to present the result of adding the two numbers to the page, instead of the placeholder text. Once the button is clicked, the calculation is run.
Remember the HTML attributes and how they are used?
A displays function takes in two elements from a web page, converts them to numbers, adds them together, and passes them to another element as inner values.
As a result of setting unique attributes on these elements, we were able to access them from our JavaScript.
How do you combine HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?
We format, design, and program web pages using these three languages together.
It gets rendered into a website when you link together web pages with hyperlinks, along with all their assets on the server computer, such as images, videos, and so on.
Users are typically able to see and interact with the rendered content on the front end, where this rendering occurs.
A website’s back end stores and gives access to data, including sensitive information such as passwords. Website content that exists only on the server computer, and is not displayed on the client computer. The user cannot readily access this content on the client’s computer.
Final thoughts
When building websites, web developers use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The site is programmed in JavaScript, it is structured in HTML, and it is designed in CSS.
CSS can be used to create animations and smooth transitions.
CSS can also be used for some basic programming. This can be seen in the case of media queries, where different style rules are defined for different screen resolutions (sizes).
Furthermore, JavaScript is now used outside the browser as well.
However, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript remain the most powerful languages on the Web.
