Course material for each component

Content

Most web pages are written in the language HTML. The H and T stand for "hypertext", which is text interconnected by links. The M and L in HTML stand for markup language, which you can think of as content with extra "markings" to indicate the roles of various parts of the content. In our running example, you can see a few types of possible markings: the header of the page, a section containing recipes within which is an image, and links to other pages. We will consider all the parts of this page in more detail as the course progresses.

image of rhubarb marked page

HTML is not a programming language, though your browser is a program that translates HTML into a visual representation. HTML has been continuously evolving through a series of numbered versions. We will consider both commonly-used features and new features introduced in HTML5.

Style

The style of a page is represented using CSS, where SS stands for "style sheets". A style sheet is a way of storing information about style. The tricky part about managing styles is when there is more than one instruction on how a part of a page should be styled, for example, if there are conflicting instructions on different style sheets. You'll have to be patient and wait until near the end of the course to learn how to handle the conflicts and, at the same time, what "cascading", the C, is.

Just as HTML is the standard language for web pages, CSS is the standard language for style. What is taught here is compatible with the latest version, CSS3.

Action

There are various programming languages a clientThe computer of the reader of the web page. can use to make changes to the appearance of a web page; probably the most commonly used of such languages is JavaScript. The Script part refers to scripting language, usually used to describe a language that is used for a specific domain, such as the web. The Java part is more confusing than helpful: it is invoking the popularity of a programming language with that name, even though the languages are unrelated.

JavaScript will not be considered in this course; after completing the material on HTML and CSS, you might consider using our web programming course to learn about client side programming in JavaScript.

Why is client underlined?

If you put your cursor over the word client, or any term underlined with a dotted line, you will see its definition, as stored in the glossary.