Your Tour Begins Here.
A web page is a document having a unique location on the World Wide Web and is viewable by a web browser. Common web browsers include Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. Web pages can display a wide variety of objects including simple text, sounds, images, videos and more. We can even use web pages for more complex things like shopping, banking, and video streaming applications. The remarkable thing about web pages is that we can create them with nothing more than your favorite text editor.
Web pages in the early days of the World Wide Web were static. A user could go to a page and look at the pretty formatted page but could not interact with it. Today, we expect so much more. We go to amazon, enter a search phrase, and see applicable products appear. We can then add these items to a shopping cart and purchase the cart's contents and see recommendations for related products.
What can we learn from all this information? There are three major parts of a web page: a way to display the visual pieces, a way to make the page look pretty or not so pretty, and a way to make the page respond to the user. For a simple web page, we can combine all three parts in a single file. A better design for more complex web sites, a collection of related web pages, is to break each of these three parts into separate files.
These three parts are:
- HTML which defines what we see on the page.
- CSS which defines how the page looks.
- JS , JavaScript, which allows the web page to respond to user interaction.
This Web Fundamentals tour will begin with HTML and static web pages including inline styling and scripting, then moving the styling into CSS, and finish with moving the scripting into a JavaScript file.
There many frameworks which make a lot of this work simpler, but ultimately all of these frameworks build on these fundamentals.
If you are just beginning your journey into web development, this tour should be your starting point. I hope you enjoy this tour.
Created: 04 October 2019, Updated: 04 October 2019