“How to even begin with coding?” Most of us have this question hovering around our heads till this becomes a frail thought and we’re on the verge of giving up. However, the only way to begin is, to literally begin. If you want to become a developer, and want to design websites, but you’re stuck about getting started, this is quite the reading for you! The bread and butter of this blog is HTML, which might help you to create a basic webpage.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) is as old as the world wide web itself, for it was first launched at 1995. We are using HTML5 today.
HTML contains tags and components, both of which combine to form what we call is HTML element. HTML tags are pre-defined, that distinguishes it from XML, another markup language. We have a head tag and a body tag. The head tag contains meta information, title and is used for SEO and analytics purpose. Some tags used are <title>,<meta>,<script>, <link rel=”stylesheet”>. The body tag contains tags like <h1>, <p>,<div>,<img>,<a> for headings, paragraphs, div (it is like a container which is used so that you can style it later) and for anchor text, respectively.
Most code editors automatically create the basic HTML code we need, which is called boiler plate template. You can type the desired title and headings, which creates your first webpage, and you can view it on your local server, in Chrome. It’s that easy!
HTML is not just limited to tags and containers. You can style your text on your HTML file itself. Bold, italic and underlined options are available with <strong>, <em> and <u> respectively. You do not need to create additional javascript and CSS files to make your website interactive and stylish. Within <script>… </script> tags you can add Javascript elements and features on your HTML file. Similarly <style>….</style> works for CSS file.
Another important feature of HTML is its attributes. Attributes are important when you have to link your HTML page to CSS and Javascript. Two global attributes are classes and ids. When you declare a class or id in HTML, CSS recognises it with a ‘.’ and ‘#’ respectively. Similarly JavaScript uses query selector to identify these attributes. A div is basically a container that contains code which needs to be styled/ made interactive. So, whenever we create classes or ids, the block of code within the div can be identified in CSS and JS files and features can be added to it.
HTML forms are used to create forms to login or pay or add details. They make use of <form> and <input> tags, wrapping one more input elements. We can make use of radio buttons, check boxes and drop downs to submit our choice out of multiple options, using <checkbox>, <radio> and <select> tags which can be labelled using <label>.
Note that checkboxes and buttons are different. A <button> tag creates a button and clicking on it will lead to another page, but it isn’t used to submit options.
Thus HTML alone can create a website, enough to fairly work. However, we need to add components and style and data to run large websites.
