What are HTML and CSS? Why Learn Them?

Hey everyone! I’m so excited to start this journey with you. We’re going to learn about the main tools used to build almost every website you see: HTML and CSS. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to create cool websites yourself. Let’s jump in!

How the Web Started: A Quick Look Back

To understand HTML and CSS, let’s think about how the internet began. Not long ago, in the early 1990s, there were no smartphones or social media. The internet, or World Wide Web, was just starting. It was made to help scientists share information. Soon, it grew into the huge thing we use every day.

In those first days, webpages were simple, mostly just text. People needed a clear way to organize this information and link it together. That’s when HTML came along.

HTML: The Backbone of Your Website

Think of HTML as the bones or structure of a webpage. HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Let’s break that down simply:

HyperText: This just means you can click on words or pictures to go to another page. It’s how websites are connected.
Markup Language: This means it uses special “tags” to show what different parts of a page are. These tags tell your web browser, “This is a title,” or “This is a paragraph,” or “This is a picture.”

Without HTML, a webpage would just be a mess of words. HTML gives your content meaning and puts it in order. It’s the first step to building anything on the web.

CSS: Making Your Website Look Great

If HTML is the bones, then CSS is the skin and style. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It’s all about how your website looks.

With CSS, you can change:

Colors: For text, backgrounds, and lines around things.
Fonts: What the text looks like, how big it is, and how thick.
Layout: Where everything sits on the page, how much space is between things.
Animations: Making things move or change on your page.

Imagine a house with a perfect structure (HTML) but with plain, unpainted walls and no furniture. That’s a webpage without CSS. CSS makes it pretty and easy to use!

Simple Example: HTML is the House, CSS is the Decorating

Let’s use a simple example to make this clear:

Imagine you’re building a house.

HTML is like the house itself. It’s the walls, the roof, the doors, and the windows. It gives the house its basic shape and size. Without these, you don’t have a house.
CSS is like painting the walls, choosing the furniture, and decorating the rooms. It makes the house look nice, feel cozy, and inviting. You wouldn’t want to live in an empty, undecorated house, would you?

Just like a house needs both a strong build and nice decoration, a website needs both HTML and CSS to work well and look good.

They Work Together, Hand in Hand

HTML and CSS are not separate; they are team players. They work together, needing each other to create a full, working webpage.

HTML gives you the words, pictures, and other content.
CSS takes that content and makes it beautiful and organized.

You will almost never see a modern website that uses only HTML or only CSS. They are two parts of one job when you build websites.

What You’ll Be Able to Make by the End of This Course

After taking this course, you’ll have the basic skills to:

Build Any Webpage: You’ll know how to use HTML to put together content, make titles, paragraphs, lists, links, pictures, and more.
Style Like a Pro: You’ll use CSS to control colors, fonts, how things are laid out, and make your websites look amazing.
Create Your Own Website: Imagine making your own website for yourself or a small business!
Understand Other Websites: You’ll be able to read and understand the HTML and CSS of other websites. This helps you learn even more!
Get Ready for More: HTML and CSS are the must-have starting points for learning bigger web tools like JavaScript.

This course is your first step into the exciting world of making things on the internet. Get ready to turn your ideas into real websites!

Next Up: In our next video, we’ll get ready to write our very first lines of HTML code. See you there! Setting Up Your Workspace & Your First HTML Page