HTML and CSS

For HTML, our main textbook will be this tutorial from Mozilla.org. Mozilla publishes the Firefox web browser. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are presented in Chapters 18 and 19 of our book, and will follow that primarily. The Mozilla tutorial on that material isn't bad either.

Web pages are written in the Hypertext Markup Language, HTML. HTML was originally created by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. HTML has evolved over time, and passed through several versions. The latest standard is called HTML 5, and that is what we will be studying. Any unmodified reference to HTML means HTML 5.

This section will concentrate on the portions of HTML needed to build static web content: pages that do not interact with the user, but display information much like a printed page. When we discuss dynamic pages, we'll introduce additional features of HTML along with the other technologies supporting dynamic content.

As originally developed, HTML would specify the structure of a document, but the actual appearance of the parts was largely up the browser. This frustrated designers who wanted more control over appearance. Consequently, HTML started sprouting more tags and attributes to control appearance. It didn't help when different browsers added different ones, making it hard to know if your careful design was going to be followed in any particular browser

Eventually, Cascading Style Sheets were added to deal with this problem. CSS is actually a separate language, often embedded inside HTML, which expresses the appearance of the various HTML elements. The idea is to use HTML to express the structure of the document, and CSS to control its appearance.

In this section, we start with the basics of HTML and CSS, but will will be learning more about them all through the semester

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