HTML and CSS

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You have probably used so-called "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get" (WYSIWYG) web page editor before. You select text, press the bold button, and voilà! Your text is bold. But what's really happening behing the scenes is that your editor is generating HTML and CSS code. Indeed, every page you view on the internet is built using HTML and CSS. In this guide, you will learn the principles of HTML and CSS and learn how they fit together to make a web page.

Basic Structure of a Web Page

The most basic web page is shown below. 

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
	<title>My First Web Page</title>
</head>
<body>
	<p>Hello World!</p>
</body>
</html>

If you were to open this page in Firefox, you would see the following:

(image here)

This is the skeleton of every web page on the internet. Things to notice:

  • The page begins with a DOCTYPE declaration. This is a mandatory part of a web page, and it tells the browser what version of HTML to use when rendering your page. In this case, the browser should use HTML 5.
  • The rest of the page consists of tags, in a hierarchy as follows:
    • html
      • head
        • title
      • body
        • p

You can view a web page's source code in your browser; in Firefox, the keyboard shortcut is Ctrl-U (or Command-U), and in Chrome, it Alt-Ctrl-U (or Option-Command-U).

Introduction to HTML

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. Notice that HTML is not a programming language, so it doesn't have classes, methods, variables, or anything else you may be used to seeing. Instead, HTML defines the content of a web page, and it uses tags to do that for you.

Tags

Tags define the content of your page. There are two types: content tags and empty tags.

Content Tags

A content tag is a container for other tags on your page, and it participates in the nesting hierarchy of a web page. The general format looks like this: 

<tagname> Contents </tagname>

If you've used BBCode before in online forums, HTML should look familiar, except that it uses angle brackets (less-than and greater-than signs) instead of square brackets.

Empty Tags

An empty tag represents an element on your page that does not participate in the nesting hierarchy. An empty tag looks like this: 

<tagname />

Although the trailing slash is optional on empty tags, it is considered best practice to include it, and it also makes it more clear what's a content tag and what's an empty tag when reviewing your code.

Attributes

Both content tags and empty tags can have attributes that further define their functionality. You define an attribute like this: 

<contenttag attribute="value"> Content </contenttag>
<emptytag attribute="value" />

Commonly Used Tags

Here is a list of commonly used tags in HTML. For a complete list, see the list at W3Schools.

Empty tags are distinguished from content tags by the presence of a trailing slash.

Semantic Elements

Use these tags for defining broad sections of your page with a specific purpose.

  • <header> Defines the header section of a web page
  • <footer> Defines the footer section of a web page
  • <nav> Defines the section of your page that contains navigation links
  • <article> Defines an article on your page (useful for screen readers)
  • <section> Defines a real section of your page; for example, one with unique headings distinct from the rest of the document
  • <figure> Defines a figure
    • <figcaption> Defines a caption for that figure (<figcaption> should be nested inside of <figure>)
  • <form> Defines a form into which the user should input data
    • <input type="text/number/date/radio/etcetera" name="name" /> Defines an input field of a certain type
    • <label for="input-id"> Defines a label for an input field with the ID input-id
    • <select name="name"> Defines an input field where the user can select one or more choices (like a drop-down box)
      • <option value="value"> Defines an option for the select box
    • <textarea name=""> Defines a text box (which is larger than a text field)

External Media

Use these tags to include external media onto your page.

  • <iframe src="source"> Represents a little window on your page into which source is loaded; source could be a PDF document, for example, or an entire other web page
  • <link rel="what" type="mime" href="source" /> Defines an external document what located at source with the mime type mime that should be loaded into your HTML page. Note: <link /> does NOT define a hyperlink! <a> is for that. Used most commonly for including CSS stylesheets.
  • <img src="source" alt="text" /> Defines an image located at source that has a textual representation of text
  • <audio> Represents an audio clip on your page
  • <video> Represents a video clip on your web page
  • <canvas> Defines a canvas for advanced drawing (we will learn more about this in future modules)

Outlining Elements

Use these elements to define an outline for your page, including definitions and citations.

  • <h1> to <h6> Defines the outline for your page
  • <p> Defines a paragraph of text
  • <dl> Defines a Dictionary List
    • <dt> Defines a Dictionary Term
    • <dd> Defines a Dictionary Definition
  • <table> Defines a table for displaying data
    • <thead>, <tbody>, <tfoot> Defines the heading, body content, and footing of a table
      • <tr> Defines a table row
        • <th> Defines a table cell that contains a heading
        • <td> Defines a table cell that contains data
  • <ol> and <ul> Define ordered and unordered lists, respectively (meaning numbered lists and bulleted lists)
    • <li> Defines a list item for either <ol> or <ul>
  • <q> Represents a short, inline quotation quoted from another source
  • <blockquote> Represents a longer block of text quoted from another source

Miscellaneous Elements

This section lists useful elements that don't fit into one of the other categories.

  • <a href="destination"> Make a hyperlink to destination
  • <br /> Denotes where a line break should appear (note that white space is ignored when rendering, so a line break in the source code is not reflected in the output)
  • <button> Defines a clickable button
  • <code> Defines a piece of computer code
  • <output> Defines the result of a calculation
  • <pre> Defines pre-formatted text in which whitespace will be preserved
  • <script> Defines a script for your page (we will learn a lot more about this in later modules)
  • <div> Defines a block section of your document (useful for styling)
  • <span> Defines an inline section of your document (useful for styling)

High School Analogy

In more ways than not, HTML can be thought of as a markup language for five-paragraph essays that you wrote in history class in high school. <blockquote> is used to denote long quotations; <h1> through <h6> denote the outline; <p> denotes new paragraphs; <figure> and <figcaption> represent exhibits; <section> could represent chapters if you were writing a longer report; and so on.

Take home message: HTML defines the content of your page. Use it to its full ability.

Introduction to CSS

Notice that we haven't said a word about how things look yet. This is because that is what CSS is for!

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, and it defines the appearance of your page. CSS is composed of rules, and each rule consists of a selector and one or more declarations. Let's see an example: 

header {
	color: blue;
	font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;
}

The above CSS rule does three things:

  • It selects all <header> elements
  • It declares the foreground color (i.e. the text color) of the selected elements to be blue
  • It declares the font of the selected elements to be Verdana, or alternatively any sans-serif font if Verdana is not available

All CSS rules follow this general format. The following sections will discuss more detail on CSS selectors and declarations.

Selectors

Using HTML and CSS in your Web Page

Recall that HTML defines the content of your page, while CSS defines the appearance.

Most of the HTML you write will be in the <body> tag, because, naturally, this is where the content of your page should reside. CSS, on the other hand, is supplemental to the content, and so it should be included in the <head> tag, as shown in the following section.

How to Include CSS

There are three options for using CSS in your web page:

  1. Loading external stylesheets
  2. Embedding stylesheets in the document
  3. Inline styles using the style attribute

The first option is almost always preferred in production applications for the following reasons:

  • Browsers can cache external stylesheets, so once they've loaded the stylesheet once, they won't have to load it again, making future pages load faster and reducing requests to your server
  • External stylesheets are more modular; that is, they can be included in multiple pages on your web site without the need for copying and pasting embedded stylesheets

To include external stylesheets in your document, place the following empty HTML tag in your <head>: 

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="path/to/stylesheet.css" />

It may be convenient during development to use embedded stylesheets, because then you don't have to click back and forth between files in your IDE and clear your browser cache. You may place embedded stylesheets in a <style> tag, also in your <head>: 

<style type="text/css">
styles {
	go: here;
}
</style>

For a variety of reasons, inline styles should almost always be avoided. Instead of using inline styles, give your element a CSS class, and assign styles to that class in your stylesheet: 

p.danger {
	color: red;
}

<p class="danger">You'd better think twice about using inline styles!</p>
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