Introduction
HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript are the languages that run the web.
- HTML adds meaning to content by marking it up.
- CSS formats that marked up content.
- JavaScript makes that content and its formatting interactive.
Languages Versus "Web Development":
Mastering HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is only a prerequisite for becoming a "professional" web developer. There are a bunch of other practical skills that you need to run a website:
- Organizing HTML into reusable templates.
- Standing up a web server [!]
- Moving files from your local computer to your web server.
- Reverting to a previous version when you screw something up.
- Pointing a domain name at your server [!]
Dealing with these complexities involves setting up various "environments" to organize your files and handle the building ⁄ deploying of your website.
Web Publishing:
Back in the days of the printing press, printers created documents by arranging metal characters, dipping them in ink, and pressing them onto a piece of paper.
Instead of arranging moveable type, web developers write HTML and CSS that convey content in meaningful ways, and deal with presentational issues, such as selecting which font to use, setting the size of headings, and determining the space between lines of text.
Printers used to print a bunch of pages and bind them into a book. Nowadays, we create a bunch of HTML files and link them together into a website.
Learning HTML and CSS is a matter of understanding the available HTML markup and CSS rules to make a browser render those files exactly how they are supposed to.
Tools of the Trade:
The basic editing workflow for all web developers is to write (or edit) code in your text editor, save it, and then open it up (or reload it by pressing Ctrl+R) in a web browser to see how it looks.
Take the time to get really good at using your text editor. Decent ones come with features that let you write code faster than you normally could.
Fully leveraging your text editor is the craftsmanship part of learning HTML and CSS, for mastering the craft of writing HTML and CSS is what distinguishes amazingly productive developers from average ones.
The only real prerequisite for a good web browser is that it is up to date and in mainstream usage.