Three Pillars of Web Development
When diving into web development, it can be a bit overwhelming looking over everything that goes into building a competent interactive website.
Git & GitHub, libraries and frameworks, APIs & Postman, and UI & UX, all cover a lot of information. It can be intimidating staring down all of these new and unfamiliar technologies all at once.
While the field of web development includes many concepts and technologies you should be familiar with, the three main pillars you should begin with are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Start strong with these fundamentals and everything else will become much easier to understand.
This article will discuss the main components of each of these pillars as well as additional resources to help you on your web development journey.
HTML
HTML stands for hypertext markup language. This markup language is the basic foundation and structure of a webpage. Without HTML, CSS has nothing to style, and JavaScript has nothing to interact with.
Hypertext illustrates how the web is interconnected through hypertext links. Your ability to click this hyperlink and connect to a different webpage is a large part of what makes the web so successful.
Markup illustrates the syntax that we use for HTML in order for the browser to understand how to correctly display the content of the HTML file to the user.
When building a website, HTML is the starting point. Your webpage is essentially an HTML file. If you are building a multipage website, then you will need multiple HTML files, with each file representing its own webpage.
It is common practice among developers to name the main page index.html, and to group all the HTML files and assets together in one directory.
Your HTML files display the content of your webpage, such as the text, headings, images, buttons, etc.