From the course: Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End

HTML as the foundation

From the course: Succeeding in Web Development: Full Stack and Front End

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HTML as the foundation

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- Whether you're a front end, back end, full stack, or any type of web developer, there is one language that everyone needs to master, and that's HTML. HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language. It describes the content and defines the structure within a webpage. Hypertext means that documents on the web are not meant to be consumed in a linear fashion. They're designed to be linked to other documents. A friend and developer has to understand the relationship of the entire site, and how documents relate to one another. Now this is called information architecture, and it involves how best to structure a website. How a user is going to navigate, and what type of access users need to other content. The second part of HTML is the markup language. That's the set of tags that are added to the text of a webpage to define its structure. It has some really critical roles. First, it defines the role each piece of content will have. Some content will identify different parts of the page like headers, navigation, and footers. Some tags describe non-textual elements like images or video. Now all web developers are masters of the markup language. They have to be detail-oriented, and passionate about structure and semantics. Markup does something else that is really important. It generates the DOM, or Document Object Model. The DOM describes the structure of the page, and it's sort of like an outline or a map of the content within a website. When you add Markup tags to a document, you're building the map that defines the role of your content. This map is really important to how CSS and JavaScript work. The DOM is the way you access elements on the page with the other languages. The DOM is so important to sites and apps that if it isn't coded correctly, it can break the entire website. Although there are many skills to learn in web development, HTML is foundational to every type of job, and although technically it's the easiest of the languages, it's also the one everyone must master.

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