Why learn HTML and CSS?
- HTML is the foundation of pretty much any other web markup language. So if you’re going to make a website, you're going to need to know HTML in some capacity.
- It’s beneficial to know at least some HTML, because this will really help you find your way around the Internet. You’ll be able to view the source of any website and figure out what makes it tick.
- CSS allows you to design and shape an entire website without ever touching its content. All aspects of design from small tweaks to complete overhauls can be accomplished through just CSS.
- Advanced CSS properties like animation are supported by modern smartphones and run smoothly in their native browsers. Other animation standards like Flash run inconsistently or sometimes not at all.
- Both languages are governed under web standards, which means that as long as you use them correctly, your pages will automatically appear as intended across modern browsers. This is in contrast to desktop software, which usually needs separate versions written for each platform (like Windows and Mac).
Why not learn HTML and CSS?
- They’re static languages, meaning you write pages, not sites. Websites that change or update automatically require actual programming in order to accomplish all of their functionality. For example, if you wrote a webpage in HTML that displayed the time, you would have to recode the site every minute and upload the latest version. Instead, you would probably have to use something like PHP or Ruby to accomplish this.
- We will be using text editors during these lessons, but there are tools such as Dreamweaver that can handle HTML and CSS for you, automatically.
Lessons
- Lesson 1: The big picture, HTML tags, and structure
- Lesson 2: More structure, headers, paragraphs, links, and images
- Lesson 3: Breaks, lists, and comments
- Lesson 4: Stylesheets, fonts, colors, and borders
- Lesson 5: The CSS box model, display, and float
- Lesson 6: Styling lists, links, and cascading
- Lesson 7: Divs, spans, IDs, and classes
- Lesson 8: Tying it all together, doctype, and validation
About
Brian Sutorius has been messing around with HTML and CSS for over 10 years. The first edition of this series was written in November 2007, and the second edition in September 2011. With the second edition, the lessons themselves are now written in HTML and CSS.