Write your first lines of HTML and CSS | Tutorial part 2| Emily Reese| Learn Web design
Welcome! You're here because you want to build websites. That's a pretty good plan these days. Who doesn't want to make groovy, cool sites like the ones we all know and use to stay in touch with our friends, to foster social good, and more?
You might've already heard "Oh, just start with HTML!" Just start with CSS!" when you ask about how to begin learning programming.
That advice is pretty solid.
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is the tool which will allow you to build webpages and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is what you use to make them look the way you want them to.
We'll explore both languages and write your first snippets of each. Let's start with something a little more familiar: web pages!
Pages
Web pages are like regular pages, but online. Thanks, Captain Obvious! This is a useful comparison to explore, though. Consider a newspaper page. On it, you have headings, sections, articles, images, and layouts which organize content that's styled to look a certain way.
Back in the old days, it was someone's responsibility to physically arrange elements on a newspaper printing press in order to tell a story. They would set attention-grabbing headlines, for example, that were complemented by content in paragraphs. They would lay out the different sections and articles on a page according to the hierarchy of the content and the story they wanted to tell via these elements.
Then, depending on the newspaper, the exact type-setting would have a certain font and characteristic style. The aesthetic appearance of the page is different from the content itself.
This separation is exactly the same for web pages. You have:
content
its appearance
HTML is the language that handles the first concern: creating structured content to tell a story.
CSS covers the second concern: customizing the appearance of that content to visually bring it to life.
Practice!
We haven't studied the syntax of HTML and CSS yet. In fact, we've barely touched them at all! Nonetheless, we're going to dive right into writing our first lines of these two languages so that you can immediately understand the relationship between content (HTML) and its appearance (CSS). You're going to write your first snippets of HTML and CSS. You don't need to understand why the code looks the way it does; we'll get to that in the next chapter! The point of this exercise is for you to get your first taste of adding content (HTML) and changing its appearance (CSS).