HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is code used to display and structure content. What you’re reading right now is possible because of HTML. By itself, it’s not the most attractive thing to look at. It has no styling options that are useful. That’s why HTML works best alongside other languages such as CSS, or plug-ins that add their own unique styles.
The structure of a standard line of code in HTML is pretty simple. It contains an opening and closing tag, the attribute, and the content. All together, these create something called an Element.
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Its purpose is to provide customization to elements of a website. You can link the CSS file to an HTML document and use identifiers such as the type of opening and closing tags or attributes such as a ‘class’ or ‘ID’ to change the appearance. This is where more creative liberty can be taken to properly format things. Fonts, size, indentation, colors, just about anything can be customized to make your site more unique.
The syntax of a standard section of CSS contains the selector (what gets targeted in HTML is going to be changed), the property (whats being changed), and the property value (how it’s being changed). Any pair of a property value and a property is called a declaration. There can be as many declarations inside of a selector as the developer wishes.
JavaScript (JS), is one of the more difficult languages for front-end web development. Its purpose is to add logic handling to a website. As far as learning this independently, it was more complicated than other things that I've learned throughout this project. JavaScript code can be written or imported in your HTML code using the 'script' tag. For my site in particular, there will be little to no examples of it being used, and that was done intentionally. This site was meant to model what core aspects go into a website, behaving almost like an article. Wanting to keep my project about a "good" website, it felt like adding JavaScript would be forced and unnecessary.
These languages are focused on Front end web development. That revolves around giving your website ease of access, optimizing user experience, basically in charge of what viewers will see and encounter when looking through your site. Back end web development is in charge of server-side management. Any information that users send through their site, like clicking on links or other things, Back-end developers manage what gets sent to them. Making sure things are secure and protected are important, while still making sure that the users will get the results that they want. This uses a variety of other programming languages that I don't use because I'm not hosting my server on my own device. Rather, I am hosting this website through a web-hosting provider called Cloudflare.