As a newcomer coder, you should learn HTML. According to the latest studies, 3 million Google searches are carried out every 60 seconds! 4320 MILLION per day and rising. Everything is on the Web and comes in the form of ‘pages’, but how does one create a web page?
Sure, there are a number of sites you can use to create your own Website. There they’ll offer you a number of different ‘themes’ which come with a specific layout, font, etc. However, if you want to get creative and have complete control of your site, it’s important to know how to make these back-end tweaks. In order to do so, you should learn HTML. As all the web pages in the world use HTML, this is a good place to start. If we look for a definition on Google we will find something like this:
“Hypertext markup language (HTML) is the major markup language used to display web pages on the Internet. In other words, web pages are composed of HTML, which is used to display text, images or other resources through a web browser.”
HTML: how does it work?
So, does this mean that I should create a website learning HTML? Yes and no. HTML is simply the structure of any given web page. But you need to include a lot more information to complete it. If we think of a house, HTML would be its skeleton. Of course, a skeleton has many and various parts . In HTML each of the parts of the structure is known as a TAG. In order to create a single web page you need many parts, or TAGs, never mind for an entire website.
Each TAG is an element that can contain content or other elements and must have an opening and a closing (or a start and an end).
A TAG could refer to the colour of the font, whether the font is bold, in italics or if there is a new paragraph, etc. So you see, when we start to add these elements into the structure of the website, it starts to take shape and creatively we can have some fun with it!
There is more information that a Web page must contain, such as the language in which it is written, the characters it uses, the title of the website to index it in the search engines, etc … but we will explain that in future Technobabble articles.
Start using HTML
You can write HTML in a simple notebook program. But this would be absolutely crazy, since simple text editors do not support the language of HTML. For this, there are many options on the market and the vast majority of them are free! They are still text editors but possess an added element that allows them to recognise the syntax of the different languages of the Web. The most popular ones are “Sublime Text”, “Brackets”, “Atom” and “Visual Code”. Why not download one of them and start practicing? You’ll see how the help they offer is essential after you’ve been writing for 15 minutes.
Interested in finding out more about how to learn HTML and other programming languages such as Java? Take a look at our Web Development Java course.