Everything that exists in the world has its own building blocks, a basic unit where they were built up. Human body has amino acids, computer has modules, and Web Development has its own, HTML and CSS.

HTML and CSS is one the most important foundations to obtain for Web Developers. Those are web applications’ building blocks which give them life, color, and importance. Schools with Computer related courses offer some teachings with regards to these two concepts that help students build web applications at ease.

HyperText Markup Language, or which is commonly termed as HTML, is a computer language devised to allow website creation. These websites are viewed by anyone connected to the internet. The concrete definition of HTML is:

  • HyperText is the method where you move around the web – clicking hyperlinks that will bring you to other pages on the web. It is hyper for it is not linear, which means you can go to any place on the Internet without a set of order to follow.
  • Markup is what HTML tags (code that describes how a Web page is formatted) do to the text inside them.
  • HTML is a Language for it is composed of codes and syntax like any other existing languages.

Learning HTML will not take you long. It will just take few days of reading to be able to use it firsthand.  HTML will not require you to be online all the time because you can code your website offline, storing it on your own computers and just transfer it on the web when you are connected.

Web Development just doesn’t focus on you being an expert in manipulating HTML but also requires you to be knowledgeable of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a styling language that defines the layout of the HTML document. It covers the font, color, margin, line, height, width, images, positions and many other things you want to happen and see on your web pages.

CSS when used has its following benefits:

  • Can control the layout of many documents with just a single style sheet (inherit).
  • Can be used to apply different layout to different media-types (screen, print, etc).
  • There are more advanced and sophisticated techniques that will help you make your website look more appealing to the viewers’ eyes.

The concept of HTML and CSS are sometimes understood and used interchangeably. The difference between HTML and CSS is that HTML is responsible for the construction and gives the total output of the page while CSS does not “create” anything. Instead, it decorates elements in HTML.

Then, understanding HTML and CSS is not making you do the work but letting you realize their existence as part of the websites you are having fun of browsing.