More to explore

Congratulations - you've now learned basics of both HTML and CSS! The material in this module is intended to provide you with further directions for explorations. What to learn next depends on what you would like to do with what you've learned so far.

The emphasis in this course was to cover the ideas behind various aspects of web pages rather than to present all possible elements and styles. This resulted in omitting detailed information on lists and tables as well as various styles used in our examples.

In this module, we provide extra information on lists, tables, and style. Of course, this still leaves a lot to learn!

Adding more elements and styles

Now that you understand the basics, you can easily pick up the details on your own. The Help page provides links to further resources.

Using forms and adding action

We've created forms but haven't done much with the data. Learning a programming language will enable you to do so, as well as to make pages that change in various ways.

If you have no experience with programming, you might want to start with our Python course to have a good foundation in the basic concepts of programming. After the equivalent amount of programming experience, you will be ready to tackle our JavaScript course, which assumes that you are familiar with programming basics and web basics.

Web pages for the real world

We haven't addressed the issue of handling old browsers or setting up your own web site, as such information quickly becomes out of date, and can be found elsewhere. There are many tools available to assist in creation and publishing of pages; what works best for you is up to personal choice.

As far as preparing the files is concerned, here are a few tips worth knowing:

  • The default name for the main page in a directory is index.html.

  • An HTML file will typically have the ending .html and a CSS file will typically have the ending .css.

  • When you are creating a web page, make sure that you are using an editor that creates a text file; a word processing program is likely to create a file with extra information that will confuse the browser.

The Help page gives information about HTML and CSS validators that you can use to check your work.